PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Members of Families for Safe Streets, the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia, Friends of FDR Park and others gathered on Saturday with the family of a man killed on his bike last summer. The parents of Mario D’Adamo III said it would have been his 38th birthday.
“I just want to say to my son, ‘Happy birthday,’” Paula D’Adamo said. “I love you, and I miss you with all my heart.”
D’Adamo’s parents and the others were in FDR Park at a so-called “ghost bike” — a bike, spray-painted white, and chained to a post or a tree near the site of the cyclist’s death — set up in his memory.
“The goal of the ghost bike is to have a memory for both the family and for the public — to know that a person was killed riding their bicycle by a driver at a certain location,” said Nicole Brunet with the Bicycle Coalition.
Paula’s husband, also named Mario, says his son sent his final text on Aug. 4, 2023, to his brother.
“He was right around here, and he texted a picture to Michael minutes before he died,” he said. “He took a selfie and he said, ‘I just finished a 10-mile bike ride, son,’ and he snapped a picture of himself. And Michael texted him back. But he got hit.”
He told the crowd his son picked up his love of biking around Philadelphia from him. “I'm sorry that he followed me in the love of bicycling, now that I see what occurred.”
But Brunet says the bike death was not the fault of either parent.
“He was riding in the bike lane. He was being a good cyclist. It shows you that it's not enough. We need to slow people down, and we need drivers to take responsibility for their actions,” Brunet said.
“The driver that killed Mario was an impaired driver, driving a high-performance vehicle inside of a park too fast.”
Paula said learning her son was killed on his bike by a motorist was unfathomable.
“And then you get the nightmare of your life to have to bury your child and go look for a grave and no mother needs to go through this.”
Brunet says Philadelphia traffic fatalities spiked in 2020 from under 100 to 156. They have slightly decreased since then, but pedestrian and bicycle deaths have increased.
Philadelphia has received $350 million in federal grants to improve pedestrian, bicyclist and motorist safety infrastructure, she said, “but it’s going to take a while to see those improvements go in.”