Matt Glover's death still deserves an official police investigation

Alaska journalist Craig Medred continues to investigate the death of veteran bicyclist Matt Glover, which doesn’t make up for the lack of an official investigation by the Fairbanks City Police.

Here is Medred’s latest piece, which includes extended comments by Fred Aker, the driver who hit and killed Glover on the Richardson Highway on October 13, 2022.

Aker told Medred in a Facebook message that the police did not include what he said in their report on the accident. And the police did not ask him for a written statement.

“Having never been in an accident while driving, I didn’t know about writing it up. I figured he (the police officer) would write up what I told him,” Aker said.

“And your and everybody’s thoughts on what and how it happened are so very far from reality. Everything y’all said were assumptions, nothing even close. If you want to know exactly what happened, I would be willing to talk to you so you will have the accurate truth about this horrible accident.”

Medred provides Aker’s full account and the driver’s description of what he saw that morning at 5:30 a.m.

“Aker has managed to rationalize all of this in his mind as the collision being Glover’s fault, and that is understandable. But the decision by law enforcement–in this state and others–to accept these sorts of rationalizations as an acceptable explanation for deadly collisions has become part of what makes the roads of America increasingly unsafe for cyclists, motorcyclists and other vulnerable road users,” Medred writes.

“Enforcement can’t get any less than none at all, which is typically the case in Alaska when a vulnerable road user is killed by a motorist. Despite Aker’s claim that ‘everything I’ve seen from the comments (says that) evidently bicyclists never make mistakes and the motorists are always at fault,’ the data on the legal consequences of killing a vulnerable road user point to a conclusion exactly the opposite.”

“Bicyclists, pedestrians and motorcyclists killed or maimed in collisions are usually treated as the ones at fault. This applies even in cases where the dead were obviously not at fault as was the case with retired Anchorage dentist Carlton Higgins who was run down and killed while in a crosswalk in Alaska’s largest city last year.”

Medred headlined his piece “Four Deadly Seconds.”

Glover, 48, traveled more than 5,000 miles a year by bicycle, rising every morning at 4 a.m. and commuting winter and summer from North Pole to Fairbanks along the shoulder of the Richardson Highway. He worked as a locomotive engineer for the Alaska Railroad.

“He was very conscientious of being visible on his bike with reflective clothing and lights,” Arleen Glover, his mother, wrote to Alaska legislators. “But with all that, he wasn’t safe.”

A 2015 GMC Sierra pickup driven by Aker, then 66, hit him at the Badger Road on-ramp to the Richardson Highway. Glover died from complications five weeks later.