The week of May 23, 2013, should have been a big one for Dylan Mitchell: It was the 21-year-old’s first week as an electrician apprentice, and his first week living in San Francisco. A native of Clayton, just east of Concord in Contra Costa County, Mitchell grew up in a family of electricians four-generations deep.
His plans to carry on that tradition were cut short for him that Thursday morning, when a Recology garbage truck struck him at the intersection of Mission Street and South Van Ness Avenue as he rode his bicycle to work. Mitchell was pronounced dead at the scene.
“He was just so charismatic, so outgoing. I don’t think there was a single person that didn’t love him when they met him. He could just make friends anywhere he went,” said Mitchell’s mother, Julie Mitchell, last week. “He was just a ray of sunshine, and I miss him every single day.”
Dylan Mitchell is one of the more than 40 people since 1997 killed on San Francisco streets while riding bicycles, according to the organizers of tomorrow’s Ride of Silence. Motorized vehicles causes most of the fatalities. Since the event’s creation in 2003, every third Wednesday of May sees thousands worldwide attending bike rides that pay homage to cyclists who have been killed on the road.
In San Francisco, which has been participating since at least 2012, the May 15 participants will ride silently for approximately three miles from the Mission to City Hall, with designated stops along the route where organizers will read the names of those killed nearby. At times, friends and family members will also share a few words remembering their loved ones.
The event is purposefully trying to put a human face to death statistics and transform them into human stories. This year’s list contains just over 40 names, including that of a 4-year-old hit and killed by a car last year at the intersection of 4th and King streets.
“Even though we are aware of the statistical number of fatalities that have occurred over several years, we feel the purpose of our ride is to provide a space for our community to heal,” said longtime organizer Paul Valdez. “Most importantly, to intimately learn about the lives we are honoring through remembrances and stories by family members and friends of those we lost.”
The event has its roots in Dallas, where Chris Phelan organized the first ride in 2003 to honor the memory of his friend Larry Schwartz, who was hit and killed when a bus struck him from behind. It was also a Thursday morning, like the day Mitchell was killed in San Francisco, and almost exactly 10 years before Michell’s death.
What Phelan started sparked a sequence of events that has taken the Ride of Silence to hundreds of cities across the world. Last year, at least 223 cities in 16 different countries on five continents participated. At its peak in 2016, 410 cities participated.
San Francisco is one of 194 Rides of Silence registered so far this year. Valdez said that while the ride is not political, participants hope to urge city leaders to invest in safer road infrastructure for cyclists as a preventative measure, and not only as a response to tragedy.
“The bicycle community in San Francisco is very tight. We all know each other, and we know our people who ride alongside us, so when there is a fatality, it hits us,” said Valdez, one of the hundreds of volunteers who keep the Ride of Silence rolling around the world. “We may not [all] know somebody who died at a certain intersection, but it affects us so deeply where it hurts.”
San Francisco’s ride will start at 6 p.m. at In Chan Kaajal Park at 17th and Folsom streets in the Mission District, and will make six additional stops before it reaches City Hall where organizers plan to install a white-painted bicycle, known as a ghost bike, right in front of the building. City Hall will then light up in white as a gesture of solidarity.
For Brandon Alvarado, the organizer of San Jose’s ride and president of the board for the Ride of Silence, the event is about bringing cyclists together and offering a space to mourn. He recalls strangers hugging and crying with each other at past rides.
At one tribute ride that Alvarado helped organize — different from a Ride of Silence, in that it was dedicated to a single individual — the words of the victim’s family stuck with him.
“We didn’t do the ride silently, per their request to play [the victim’s] favorite playlist. The daughter said that it was her first day she smiled and felt good about her dad since he passed away 20-something days before,” said Alvarado. “It provided a great level of closure to celebrate his life.”
Julie Mitchell echoed that sentiment, saying she has experienced great support and love from this community.
“It’s extremely touching and really it’s very emotional. It’s nice to see that other people care and that they still remember my son and feel that his life was worth something,” said Mitchell. “That he wasn’t just a statistic on the street, and that he meant something even to people that never even met him before. It just always touches my heart every year how caring everybody is.”
San Francisco Ride of Silence will meet this Wednesday, May 15, at In Chan Kaajal park at 6 p.m. For more information, visit the group’s website here.