11:45 am: Cristel Katis
Ocean Springs, Mississippi: When Cristel Katis, 61, needed to run an errand she usually hopped on her green bicycle. A native of Stuttgart, Germany, Katis never learned how to drive and preferred tooling around on two wheels. She was headed home from one such errand for t-shirts, socks, and "little stuff" at a nearby Wal-Mart in Ocean Springs when she was hit by a Ford pickup driven by a 75-year-old man. The driver didn't stop until he was pulled over by a police officer who'd witnessed the collision. He claimed not to have seen Katis riding on the side of the road. Katis was minutes from home, the third of 4 bicyclists to die in a crash that day. In all of 2005, 782 bicyclists died in crashes with motor vehicles. "She rode up that road hundreds of times," husband Michael Katis says. He learned about the crash from a friend who happened to be nearby and rushed over. "I could tell immediately she had probably been killed because there were lots of police and ambulances on the scene but no one was attending to her. She was just lying on the ground," Mr. Katis says. A police officer drove him to the hospital to wait for his wife, and Mr. Katis recalls standing outside praying for a miracle. He knew "for sure" she was dead when he saw the coroner. "This was devastating to me," Mr. Katis says of his wife's death. "I'm still not over it completely. It was horrible. Right afterward I had a hard time. I couldn't even write my name. I'd go some place to buy something and had to write a check, and I could barely scribble out my signature." Cristel and Michael Katis had been married for 18 years.
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