Beverly Owens stood in her son’s bedroom, not far from the urn that held his ashes, recounting the last conversation she had with her only child. That morning a year ago, Frederick was clopping around the apartment in his black Sidi shoes that now sit on the floor. He and some friends had planned to bike to the beach, 15 miles and a world away from their home in South Central Los Angeles.

“I feel good, Momma,” the 22-year-old told his mother. “I’m about to have a good day.” Owens cried as she recalled his parting words: “Momma, I’m free.”

Then Frederick left with his fixed-gear bike and pedaled north on Normandie Avenue. Rather than head straight to Hoover Park, where the ride would formally begin, he made a detour. A riding buddy wanted to join but had a flat, and didn’t have a spare tube or money to buy one. So Frederick—his given name was Frederick Frazier, but his friends called him Woon—shoved an extra tube and $6 in his pocket so his buddy could join the ride.

When Woon got to the busy intersection of Normandie and Manchester avenues, less than a mile from home, he arced a slow right turn. Almost instantly, the Porsche was upon him. A nearby security camera caught the moment when a driver in a white Cayenne, who had been speeding in the gutter lane, closed the gap to Woon’s rear wheel and struck him from behind.

Frazier riding just moments before the Porsche driver stuck him from behind:

The impact was fierce, more than enough to shatter the rear triangle of his carbon-fiber frame. Then the driver took off, leaving Woon to die on Manchester Avenue before an ambulance could take him to the hospital.

Perhaps an hour after her son left the house, Owens heard a knock on her door. On the front step stood three LAPD officers. One detective pushed up his shades—his eyes were red, Owens recalled—and told her that Woon had been in a crash and didn’t make it.

There were more knocks on the door that afternoon. A woman with blood stains on her shirt came to say she had held Woon’s hand as he lay in the street and talked to him about God until his last breath. That gave Owens some comfort. So did the man who came knocking later, holding an orange Buddha pendant that her son liked to wear. The man had found it near the curb on Manchester, overlooked by the crime scene cleanup crew.

That was how the day went on April 10, 2018, the day Woon was killed. For most of the intervening year, there hasn’t been much to give Owens comfort.

Woon Frazier
Woon Frazier wearing his Buddha pendant, which was later recovered at the crash site.
Courtesy Beverly Owens

The initial shock—that Woon was gone, and that whoever killed him drove away as he died—spread throughout South Central as police searched for the driver. A little more than a month later, bolstered by a flurry of social media sleuthing, LAPD officers made an arrest.

The Cayenne driver was a woman named Mariah Banks, 23 and uninsured, who turned herself in. She admitted to hitting Woon, fleeing the scene, and eventually driving about 70 miles to the city of Moreno Valley. There, she and others allegedly applied a sloppy coat of black paint to the Porsche.

It was beyond tragic, of course, but now there was hope of retribution. Someone had confessed to the hit-and-run. There was strong evidence that she tried to cover it up. Surveillance footage had captured the crime. Surely some kind of swift justice would be done.

It all sounds so straightforward, but real life in South Central does not unfold like a police procedural. Almost a year passed before the city called Owens to tell her that Banks would face criminal charges. After spending so long hoping for closure, Owens must now prepare herself to relive her son’s death and the actions of the person who killed him that day.

As we spoke during my visit in late March, Owens didn’t yet know about the pending criminal case. Instead, she complained about missing police reports, lawyers who wouldn’t take her case, and unreturned calls to the DA. Then she stopped talking and looked up at the ceiling. A long pause hung over the room, decorated with pictures of Woon.

“Sorry,” she said. “I’m just so lost without him.”

Woon Frazier
Once an overweight teenager, Woon Frazier picked up cycling after recovering from a diabetic coma.
Courtesy of Beverly Owens

Woon loved to ride. As a young teenager, he was heavy—“it’s okay, you can call him fat,” Owens said—and not especially active. Then, at age 15, he fell into a diabetic coma. Without telling his mom, the overweight, newly diagnosed diabetic sold a motorized mini-bike he’d had and bought a bicycle. Then he started riding it. A lot.

Edin Barrientos met Woon a few years after that. Barrientos is one of the founders of Chief Lunes, a weekly group ride based in South L.A. Woon, who had pedaled himself into the body of a bike racer, became a regular at the Monday-night ride, a hard but inclusive after-dark parade through urban Los Angeles. The other regulars became a second family. Woon’s mother remembered how he once cried when a work shift forced him to miss a Chief Lunes ride.

“In the beginning, he was shy,” Barrientos said. “But over time, we all got to see his sense of humor. And from the beginning, he was respectful of how the pack operates. And he always was competitive. After he died I was looking at pictures from our rides and in every one, he’s near the front. You know, Woon liked to go fast.”

But Woon’s mother and riding pals knew his cycling life meant far more than speed and competition. It meant community and friendship, confidence and heath. “Those rides saved his life,” Owens said. He rode everywhere: to jobs 20 miles away, to social gatherings. At one point he got a tattoo that made his personal philosophy—“My Bike My Life”—permanent on his thigh.

Woon Frazier Chief Lunes
A Chief Lunes ride through the streets of L.A. Woon Frazier is in the center, on the bike with red bar tape.
Harold Cerda

All cyclists face challenges in car-oriented cities like Los Angeles. But safety seems like an especially intractable problem in communities like South Central.

For one thing, the poor, largely black and Latino neighborhoods of South and East L.A. lack safe places to ride. In November, the Los Angeles Department of Transportation issued a report urging the city to prioritize safety measures on its most dangerous traffic corridors and intersections, noting that more than half of L.A.’s pedestrian and cyclist deaths occur on just 6 percent of its streets.

Data also indicates that a disproportionate number of the deadliest streets lie in the neighborhood Woon called home. Stretches of Normandie and Manchester made the DOT’s top-10 list of corridors with the highest rates of pedestrians and cyclists killed per mile.

I biked between a Metro station and Woon’s former home, and spent some time cruising up and down Normandie and Manchester. It was scary. Vehicles drove at near-highway speeds in narrow lanes. Potholes dotted the asphalt. Numerous times I saw chaos ahead, heard a speeding car behind, and dove onto the sidewalk. Barrientos, who’s ridden this part of L.A. for many years, admitted that he frequently weaves on and off the sidewalk for safety’s sake when riding solo. It’s one reason why large nighttime pack rides are so popular.

Woon Frazier ghost bike
Riders at a memorial ride for Woon Frazier pay homage at his ghost bike three days after his death.
Matt Tinoco

But fixing the problem is complicated. Affluent cyclists with access to local political power typically don’t live in South Central. Yet there are people on bikes all over the neighborhood—commuters riding to work, kids noodling around with friends, small packs of young adults on Frankenstein fixies. Barrientos said he and others are pushing for a protected bike lane on Manchester, but admitted that he’s heard local resistance to bike lanes because they are often seen, like coffee shops, as harbingers of gentrification.

The inequality embedded in L.A. also held up Owens’s chance to seek justice for Woon’s death. Negligent drivers who kill cyclists regularly escape criminal charges, but often the victims’ families find a kind of redress in civil court. Owens, however, reached out to a number of attorneys, and all declined to take the case. It turns out that when a poor person is killed by a driver without insurance, the chances of collecting civil damages are almost nil.

“It’s a crappy system,” said Steve Magas, a Cincinnati-based cycling attorney. “If a poor kid whose family doesn’t carry big UM [uninsured motorist] coverage is then hit by an uninsured motorist, there’s not much a lawyer can do. I can sue the driver and win a big judgment that looks good on paper that I can tout on my blog, but it’s likely that I’ll never collect a dime and the driver can wipe it out in bankruptcy.”

So Owens’s only hope for justice is the criminal case. Before she learned about the charges against Banks, a little more than a week before the one-year anniversary of her son’s death, things seemed hopeless. Detectives hadn’t returned her calls. Nor had the DA. She had no luck recovering Woon’s bike. “I’m a woman of faith,” Owens said. “But it’s hard to understand why the woman who did this isn’t in jail.”

Woon Frazier Crash Scene
The crash scene after a hit-and-run driver struck and killed Woon Frazier in April 2018.

Everything changed four days later, on the afternoon of April 4, when Owens said the City Attorney’s office finally called to tell her that Banks would be charged with two crimes—vehicular manslaughter and felony hit-and-run—and that a warrant had been issued for her arrest. (A DA spokesperson later confirmed this.) Banks, who has not yet been booked or had a court date set, reportedly faces up to 10 years in prison.

Owens is now readying herself for long criminal proceedings that will keep taking her back to the day her son died. And there’s more to grapple with. Two other adults were in the Porsche with Banks when she killed Woon, and one of them allegedly switched places with her to drive the Cayenne as they fled. Owens wonders if they, too, will face criminal charges. She also wonders why it took so long to bring any charges at all.

But for now, she’s turning her attention to a number of events—a ride, a vigil, a fundraising taco party, and a brief meeting with the local city council member—that Barrientos and others are planning to memorialize the anniversary of Woon’s death, to raise awareness of the need for safer streets in South L.A., and to raise money for Owens’s struggling family. Woon had been a key breadwinner: In the months before he died, he had gotten a new job with an armored car company and contributed half the rent for the family apartment. It’s putting it lightly to say his family is on the edge.

Friends and family of Woon Frazier at a memorial rally several months after he died. At this point, Mariah Banks had been released pending charges that weren’t brought until almost a year later:

Sitting in the small and crowded living room in South Central, Beverly Owens spent a few hours talking about her son and her heartbreak, but there was one more bittersweet disclosure to come. On the day of Woon’s funeral, Owens said, his girlfriend found out she was pregnant.

The baby is three months old now. The boy’s mother is trying to raise him on her own, but it’s tough. An ongoing GoFundMe campaign helped buy a crib and car seat, but diapers are expensive. A settlement in civil court would have really make a difference for the people Woon left behind.

Owens helps take care of the baby often—“almost every day,” she said. She pulled out her phone and flipped through pictures of her grandson and then her son as a child. The resemblance was clear. The boy’s name is Frederick, just like his father (and his father’s father), so Owens calls him Three Scoops.

She said there are so many moments of pain, when she thinks about how the boy will never know his father, but she also talked about the solace the baby provides. Owen is a woman of faith and feels that Three Scoops is God’s way of sharing her son’s spirit with her.

Bevery Owens and Grandson
Beverly Owens with her grandson, Frederick, who is named after his late father.
Courtesy of Beverly Owens

My visit, it seemed, was over. I said goodbye and stumbled into the harsh sunlight toward the street, to the chain-link fence with a ghost bike attached. As I pulled out my phone to take a photo, I heard shouts.

A huge crew of cyclists was pedaling down Normandie: the Fixie Goon Ride, a big monthly ride that rips through this part of the city. It wasn’t a peloton, but a two-block-long parade of mostly young black and brown men on all manner of bikes—fixies with colorful deep-section wheels, BMX rigs, choppers, department-store road bikes, you name it.

Everyone was staring and shouting at the ghost bike. Two dudes popped synchronized wheelies.

I later recalled something Owens told me that afternoon. She and her son had been talking about the dangers of riding a bike in South Central, and Woon looked up at his mother and tried to reassure her. “Don’t worry, Momma,” he said. “If something happens to me, they’ll ride for me.” She said she didn’t understand it then, but she understood it now.

A Latino guy on a tricked-out fixie was riding shotgun at the back of the Fixie Goons. As he passed the ghost bike, we made eye contact for a second. Then he titled his head back and shouted to the sky: “Long live Woon!”

The GoFundMe campaign for Woon Frazier’s son is still accepting donations.