On October 17th, four girls attending Pepperdine’s Seaver College of Liberal Arts were killed in a tragic accident. Niamh Rolston, Peyton Stewart, Asha Weir, and Deslyn Williams were seniors who were hit by twenty-two-year-old Fraser Micheal Bohm. He was speeding sixty miles per hour over the posted forty-five-mile speed limit on Pacific Coast Highway. The girls were on the sidewalk about four miles away from campus when they were struck. Bohm’s bail was posted at four million dollars with four accounts of first-degree murder. Because of reckless teenage driving, many more accidents similar to this one are bound to happen.
Pacific Coast Highway is very similar to our own Academy Drive in the sense that it has sharp and sudden turns. These turns can easily be misjudged if a driver is going too fast. The speed limit on Academy Drive is currently thirty miles per hour and many drivers go well over that.
LFA’s Security officer Norman Syndor, who has been working here for twelve years, emphasized the danger of speeding on campus. He said, “Over the years we’ve added a lot more cameras and have added car readers.” However, this has not ultimately deterred people from speeding on campus. Students are not the only ones speeding, Syndor added, he’s seen it from visitors, faculty, and staff as well. Living in Chicago in the winter means that ice is almost always on the roads. New drivers and those who are unfamiliar with harsh weather conditions are often not cognizant of the black ice [which is especially present around Academy Drive’s S curve] as well. Speeding on campus is also just as bad, Syndor said, “You have to be really careful on campus because you’ve got faculty kids running around, kids riding their bicycles, and students walking around on campus.” Many people at LFA feel the same and can recount moments where speeding has been an issue.
One of them was Enos Zaah’ 25, who rides his bike to school every day from Warner dorm, and often worries about the speeds of cars on campus. He stated, “I definitely get scared, and there was this one instance where I was on the side of the sidewalk and a car was going really fast and almost hit me.” He made it clear that because of the speed of cars on campus, he doesn’t know if the cars are going to stop or slow down for him to cross the road. It makes him feel unsafe when biking or walking on campus. Zaah suggested that to help regulate the speed we should put a speed bump on campus. This way, students will not be urged to go as fast in popular zones.
Learning about the horrific details of the accident involving Bohm and the Pepperdine students, we should all be more careful when driving, especially in school zones.
