A 25-year-old Bronx public school teacher who had been bicycling across country to raise money and awareness about affordable housing was fatally struck by a driver in Oklahoma. Newson6 reports an Oklahoma Highway Patrol report says Morris admitted to looking at her phone at the time of the crash.
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Anderson is in stable condition and Wanninkhof was declared dead at the scene of the accident, the television station reported.
Wanninkhof, 25, was biking with other cyclists to raise money for affordable housing through the nonprofit organization Bike & Build. Wanninkhof died from injuries sustained in the accident and a second cyclist with the Bike and Build group, 22-year-old Bridget Anderson, was airlifted to the OU Medical Center with a leg injury. This particular group had stopped in Tulsa on Sunday, July 26, 2015 where they spent time working with Habitat For Humanity. Because Patrick had earned an engineering degree from the University of Florida, Rik Wanninkhof said he and his wife thought their son would get an job in that field.
Tragedy also hit Bike and Build in 2010, when Paige Victoria Hicks was leading a bicycle trip from Providence, R.I., to Seattle and was struck and killed by a passing tractor-trailer.
News6.com said the trooper’s report stated that Wanninkhof and Anderson were riding west when a westbound 2014 Chevy driven by Sarah Morris, 34, of Cordell hit them.
‘This mindset was soon challenged when a student told me that she and her mom had been moving between relatives houses every week after they couldn’t pay rent.
Charissa Fernandez, the executive director of Teach for America-New York, said that members of the organization are heartbroken. “How on earth could I expect her to give her all to Newton’s Laws when she wasn’t sure where she’d be sleeping that evening?”
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When Patrick Wanninkhof wasn’t cycling, he liked to beat box, play bass guitar and – he wrote in his own bio – “build awesome demos for his physics classes”. “As a teacher in the Bronx, I know that biking across America pales in comparison to the struggles my students must overcome on a daily basis”, Wanninkhof wrote on his Bike and Build page.
