'Cyclist,' the headline word, was one-dimensional but accurate.

Andy Heines — AEP Texas spokesman, husband, father of three, devout Catholic, community volunteer, choir singer and, yes, cyclist — died Monday. Five days earlier, he was hit by a large pickup while riding his bicycle.

One difference between Andy and me was that the love-thy-neighbor approach to cycling fit his love-thy-neighbor personality. It's still difficult to accept that he is gone — that at the next Conquer the Coast ride around the bay he won't pedal up to me on his touring bike and start a conversation.

All the nice things in our news story about him and in multiple Facebook tributes were true. He was a mutual friend to overwhelming numbers of people. Many, unfortunately, discovered only after the fact that they had Andy in common as a friend.

As a company spokesman speaking for his company, he was a familiar but properly arms-length professional. As the husband of former Caller-Times reporter Vivienne Heines, he was family. Technically he was an in-law, but it went deeper. His conscious financial decision to leave journalism enabled Vivienne to continue to pursue it while they raised a family. That was a gift to the Caller-Times, to the community and to me.

I don't know if we'll ever know the true sequence of events that took Andy from us. Alexis Derise Jr., 41, has been charged in Andy's death. We know that Andy was riding on Paul Jones Avenue around daybreak when the pickup, a Ford F-250, struck him and the driver left the scene. A bus driver and other passersby found Andy unconscious at the curb and witnesses gave police descriptions that led to the truck and to Derise.

Whatever transpires in the legal system may achieve justice, but as a determinant of what happened it will be only a truce with truth. One obstruction to the truth is our tendency to consider the case only in the context of Andy's and Derise's actions as individuals. Andy was a responsible cyclist and there are ways to ride responsibly and visibly in the early morning. 'I didn't see him' as a defense strategy would be easy to refute.

There are other key factors — environmental factors. Foremost among them the status of pickup trucks and bicycles on our roadways and in our lives.

We live by the motor vehicle in this country, the exceptions being extremely population-dense urban areas where distances from home to work to shopping are more convenient to walk. We like, or have been conditioned to like, the liberty of being able to cover distances via personal motor vehicle. In this city, public transit is inefficient and inconvenient enough that its users tend to be those who have no other choice.

The result is an environment filled with fast-moving cars and trucks and an acceptance of the risk they impose on others. It's a form of tyranny on pedestrians and cyclists. The tyranny is so ingrained that often the first question in people's minds after a car-pedestrian or car-bicycle collision is: What was he or she doing walking or riding there?

I'm no longer a regular cyclist but now I have a new high-risk exposure and so does my wife. We now have five dogs that are walked three to four times a day.

Try walking five dogs at once. Try managing five unmanageable leashes in a residential neighborhood with no sidewalks. Aggressive drivers use our neighborhood as a shortcut. Sometimes we are in the middle of the street trying to manage those unmanageable leashes. Sometimes my wife and I step farther into the road to force a driver to slow down. Thus far it has worked.

If someday it doesn't, I suspect that the recriminations will be pointed at us, not the driver, whether we and the dogs survive or not.

Remember what Jesus said about who could cast the first stone? Well, I have committed every aggressive-driving sin and I am not withholding the first stone. Black Kettles, listen to the repentant Pot:

Please, drive like a child on a tricycle might wheel in front of you at any moment, or like a dog on a leash or its human friend holding the leash is in the road, or the husband and father who sang in the choir at your daughter's wedding or your mother's funeral is on that bike.

Look for that dog. Watch for that tricycle. See that bike.

What matters is not what Andy was doing on that bike, only that Andy was on that bike.

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