“Can you give me a smile?” Eleska Moore asks her 33-year-old son, once a member of the Florida National Guard. His eyes are wide, his mouth slack. “Come on, give me a smile, son.”
Jahmaar Williams blinks, then blinks again, as his mother films him. He looks like he’s trying as hard as he can, but he doesn’t smile.
Williams didn’t get his brain injury while serving as a Guardsman. Rather, he was hit by a car while crossing a road in Miramar after a Saturday night out in March 2023, then left in the road to die. A suspect was arrested months later, but for Williams’ family, the resolution of the case has brought little closure.
Florida consistently ranks as one of the most dangerous in the country for hit-and-runs that injure and kill pedestrians, as well as fatal pedestrian crashes, despite law enforcement initiatives and harsher penalties. Fatal hit-and-run accidents have continued to rise across South Florida over the last several years.
Experts say that deaths and traumatic injuries involving pedestrians like Williams are becoming more commonplace as streets become congested and people drive bigger cars down suburban roads often designed without pedestrians in mind. The accidents happen so frequently that they almost feel routine, but the victims feel their consequences for the rest of their lives.
Moore doesn’t only feel abandoned by the driver who left her son in the road.
One year after Williams was hit, the hunt over and the media frenzy long gone, she has been left largely alone, shouldering close to $100,000 in medical bills and the daily work of caring for her 6-foot-1 adult son who now has the physical and mental capabilities of a newborn child.
“You are forgotten,” Moore told the South Florida Sun Sentinel Wednesday from the rehab hospital in Houston where she has spent every day of the last month, from 9 a.m. to 6, 7, or 8 p.m. at night. “Out of sight, out of mind.”
Deadly roads
Since Williams’ injury, the tragedies have continued. Onyxia Delinois, 26, was on a morning run in the bike lane of Miramar Parkway on April 6 when a car hit her and fled. She is now in a coma, also with a severe brain injury.
That same morning, in Boca Raton, a 65-year-old man was hit and killed while crossing the pedestrian crosswalk at State Road 7 and Sandalfoot Boulevard about 4 a.m., deputies said.
Traffic safety across the U.S. “got worse during the pandemic years,” said Angie Schmitt, the author of “Right of Way: Race, Class and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America. “And the sad thing is, now the pandemic stuff is kind of calming down, we’re not seeing it even go back to where we were prior to the pandemic.”
In South Florida, the death rate for hit-and-run crashes nearly doubled between 2018 and 2023, according to data from the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles. The total number of hit-and-run crashes statewide is now in the hundreds of thousands compared to the tens of thousands a decade ago.
A 2018 report from the AAA Foundation found that New Mexico, Louisiana and Florida have the most fatal hit-and-run crashes of all states. That was before the pandemic: Florida’s 207 hit-and-run deaths in 2018 jumped to 306 in 2021, decreasing to 278 last year. Population growth played a role, but accidents per capita have also increased gradually.
In Miramar, where Williams was hit, there’s been an “increase and uptick, since COVID, in reckless behavior,” said Jose Rosales, a traffic homicide investigator for Miramar Police who investigated Williams’ crash and is now working on Delinois’ case.
Fatal car accidents involving pedestrians were already rising across the country since 2009 for multiple reasons: the 2008 recession changed the way Americans traveled, people started buying bigger cars, poverty became “suburbanized,” and technology introduced distractions, according to Schmitt, who is also the founder of 3MPH, a road safety consulting firm.
The most dangerous roads for pedestrians are “wide, suburban arterial roads” with a mix of housing and retail, Schmitt said, big enough to permit faster driving, but not highways, where pedestrians are rare.
“Florida is just really loaded with them,” she said.
Four crashes, three of them fatal, had taken place on the same stretch of Pembroke Road where Williams was hit in 2023.
Another was a hit-and-run. Silvio Jose Ortega Martinez, an immigrant from Nicaragua, had lived in Florida only a year when a car drove straight into him as he was crossing Pembroke Road, also in the early hours of a Sunday morning, like Williams. Police later arrested a woman who fled the state, then returned to Miramar.
Miramar Police spokeswoman Tania Ordaz attributes the crashes to the road’s location near several nightlife spots. When Williams was hit, he was crossing the street to get to the parking lot of a nightclub he had just left.
A year later, just last month, Richard Ferguson was killed in a hit-and-run while riding a scooter further east down the same road about 4:30 a.m. like he did every morning on his commute to work at a hardware store.
Lower-income people and minorities are also more at risk. Safer, more walkable neighborhoods tend to be affluent and white. Elsewhere, people with means are going to drive, Schmitt said, “especially in a place like South Florida where the accommodations for pedestrians are so bad. People who can afford it don’t want to sit next to a seven-lane arterial, in the sun, waiting for a bus ride.”
Bigger cars with blunt, flat front ends have also become increasingly popular, and do more damage when hitting a pedestrian, Schmitt said.
But there are solutions: Expanding cities could build new neighborhoods to be more walkable. Local governments could add crosswalks, change the way traffic signals are timed so that pedestrians have more time to cross the street, and install more street lights in dangerous areas; most hit-and-run crashes happen during low-visibility times. Street parking would help give roads a more residential feel.
Newer technology in cars, if adopted more widely, would also prevent accidents, said Miramar Police’s Rosales.
‘The only thing that kicks in with these people is fear’
For months, the driver who hit Williams went unfound, as hit-and-run drivers often do. Then, in June, Miramar Police arrested a suspect, Tremaine Herbert. His girlfriend told detectives that she saw the crash and called him right after. He told her he thought he had hit someone, according to a probable cause affidavit, but was “considering his options” because his license was suspended.
The drivers often don’t have valid licenses, detectives say. Sometimes they’re on probation or have a warrant. They didn’t see the person, or maybe they did, but thought they were in the wrong. Many times they were drinking, although if they are found too late, it’s impossible to prove.
Then there are the psychological reasons, or lack thereof.
“There’s no intent,” said Ramon “Ray” de la Cabada, a defense attorney and former prosecutor who has represented drivers in high-profile hit-and-run cases, including that of Michele Traverso, convicted of a hit-and-run back in 2012 that killed a bicyclist in Miami and spurred a harsher hit-and-run law. “The only thing that kicks in with these people is fear.”
He says his clients are typically not in denial about what happened, but come to their senses after the fear passes.
“They’re kind of in a haze, or in a fog of panic, and don’t react well,” de la Cabada said. “When they finally calm down, they usually do right by the situation. But by that point, the crime’s already been committed. By that point, the harm’s done.”
Reached by the South Florida Sun Sentinel, Traverso declined to talk, saying, “I don’t want to relive that.”
Miramar Police traffic homicide investigators cited lack of education as a big reason drivers flee. Many think they were at fault or were driving without a license, but now they’re facing up to 30 years in prison.
“Your license is suspended, you’re probably going to get some kind of civil summons,” Rosales said. “Some fines, maybe probation. You leave the scene, now it’s become criminal.” He also encouraged witnesses of hit-and-runs to stop what they’re doing and give police their information.
In the majority of hit-and-runs, the pedestrian is technically at fault, not the driver, according to traffic homicide investigators with the Broward Sheriff’s Office.
“Most of the time, the pedestrian involved in the crash is at fault for walking or running into the path of a vehicle mid-block (outside of a designated crosswalk), where a driver wouldn’t expect to encounter a pedestrian,” said spokeswoman Gerdy St. Louis.
But when the driver flees, “they commit the crime of leaving the scene of a crash involving injury or death.”
Life after the crash
Eight months after Williams was hit, Moore received a letter from the Florida Attorney General’s office, informing her that she was not eligible for victim’s compensation because “the victim’s conduct contributed to the situation that brought about the victim’s injuries/death.”
Moore said police had written that Williams was jaywalking. But there’s no crosswalk in the area where he and several others had been hit.
So she sent in an appeal, describing the three other crashes on the same street and the lack of crosswalk where the crash took place. WSVN-Ch.7 also contacted the office for a story about her struggles.
The office ended up revoking its decision and payed Moore compensation for $47,500, which covered about half of Williams’ medical bills. But the National Guard may also remove him from his insurance plan because he is no longer eligible to serve, Moore said.
“It’s a crime that people don’t talk about often, as far as victimization is concerned,” said Valerie Menard, a victim advocate with Miramar Police. “Because sometimes even the implication may be that the victims’ actions led to them being hit. But then they still deal with the aftermath of what happens to them. And their damage is often permanent.”
The arrest often does not bring the closure that people think, she added.
Moore struggles with knowing that her son can’t speak while Herbert, the man accused of hitting him, is now free on bail. She wishes there were steeper legal repercussions for leaving and better compensation for victims, perhaps in the form of financial support paid by the perpetrator. Herbert had no insurance, she said, so she can’t expect to receive anything from him.
She also wishes there was a crosswalk on the road where Williams and three others were hit. It is unclear if anything has changed since the crashes there.
“Put a crosswalk out there,” Moore said during another phone call on Friday. “Then you don’t have to go through victim’s compensation, then there’s something out there to help.”
As Moore was speaking, Williams began coughing up phlegm in the background. He isn’t able to swallow it on his own, she explained, so she has to make sure he doesn’t choke.
“It’s trauma for me to see my son go through that,” she said when she got back on the phone. Williams used to be lively and fun, with a deep voice she loved. A video before the crash shows him dancing to “Get Down on It” by Kool & the Gang. Now he needs nurses to attach him to a harness to stand.
But Moore remains hopeful.
“Come on Staff Sergeant Williams, you can do it, you can do it,” she says in another video, while nurses try to help him up.
He smiled that day, she tells the camera. She knows, eventually, she will hear his voice again.
