St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Wheelchair user faced path of resistance
By Jeremy Kohler
11/10/2005

The sidewalk on the northwest corner of Beaumont Street and Delmar Boulevard lacks a curb cut and the pavement is cracked and heavily weeded. (Robert Cohen/P-D)

When a woman in a wheelchair was struck and killed by an SUV last week, St. Louis police wondered why she had been riding on busy Delmar Boulevard.

There is little mystery about it: Elizabeth Bansen, 40, had no other way to get home from the corner store.

Much of the sidewalk along Bansen's three-block route is either broken or choked with weeds. Curb ramps are absent in key places, blocking access to the few passable stretches.

Bansen's older brother, Pete, figures his fiercely independent sister, who was known as Lisi, chalked it up to the price of city living. Her flat, at 2837 Delmar, was cheap and perfectly situated between downtown services and midtown arts centers.

But advocates for the disabled say Lisi Bansen's death could have been prevented.

"If this was something that the public cared about, Lisi Bansen wouldn't have had to wheel in the street," said Colleen Starkloff, of the St. Louis-based Starkloff Disability Institute. It is an advocacy group that pushes for policy reform for people with disabilities and the elderly.

"Our policymakers need to be aware of this and they need to get on it right away so we don't have people dying as they try to go about their day-to-day business."

It's not just a local problem, Starkloff and others say. It's national.

Federal law makes wheelchair access a civil right. St. Louis has responded aggressively in the past decade by putting curb ramps at 90 percent of the city's intersections at a cost of $7.5 million, said city streets director Jim Suelmann.

Despite these efforts, certain areas - such as Bansen's midtown neighborhood - fall through the cracks. Sidewalks are the responsibility of property owners, Suelmann said. The city offers to pay for half of a sidewalk repair if a property owner asks for help or if there is a complaint about the condition of the sidewalk, he said.

But no one had filed a complaint with his office about sidewalks near Bansen's home, or asked for the city's help in replacing them.

Starkloff called that a "poor excuse" and said the city should be more proactive in identifying problem areas and force property owners to maintain their sidewalks. She said Bansen's death should serve as a wake-up call.

One of Bansen's closest associates called her death "a personal tragedy, but also a public tragedy. We are distraught about this," said Joan Lipkin, artistic director of the DisAbility Project, a theater group that featured Bansen.

In the wake of Bansen's death, at least one property owner along the stretch - the state of Missouri - is promising to work with the city to improve its sidewalks.

Bansen's route took her past the Scott Joplin House, a historic site at 2658 Delmar operated by the Missouri Division of State Parks. The division recently acquired a vacant lot across Delmar, which has stretches of uneven sidewalk that were impassable to a Post-Dispatch reporter who tried to get through in a wheelchair.

The parks division stresses the need for its facilities to be wheelchair accessible, said spokeswoman Sue Holst, "so we need to make sure they have access in front of them."

Bansen had just bought a gyro sandwich at the Mobil station at Jefferson Avenue about 6 p.m. on Nov. 2. She crossed Delmar in her bright orange, lightweight chair and was apparently wheeling against traffic on the boulevard's eastbound side. She was near the curb when a Ford Explorer approached.

The driver, Arnold Booker, 46, of St. Louis, was headed downtown to pick up his wife from work. He told police he did not see Bansen. Police said a streetlight near the crash scene was not functioning.

Booker has not been charged. Completion of the police investigation is pending the result of toxicology tests, police said. Booker, reached at home, declined to speak with a reporter about the incident.

Lisi Bansen was a Philadelphia native who spent much of her adult life moving from one city to another, said Pete Bansen, 50, who lives near Reno, Nev. She moved to St. Louis less than two years ago because she felt she had done it all in her previous home, Columbia, Mo., he said.

Doctors diagnosed Bansen with a brain tumor in 1988 while she was attending Earlham College, a Quaker liberal arts college in Richmond, Ind. Three brain surgeries left her motor skills and speech damaged. She had some limited movement, which allowed her to use her feet to propel her chair. The surgeries left her intellect and wit intact, he said.

That spark endeared her to many St. Louisans. By many accounts, she found a life of friends, faith and free expression that made the city feel like home.

A Metro bus route map tacked to her kitchen wall, one of the few items left as her family packed up her apartment this week, shows she had managed to get around.

She was a member of the Religious Society of Friends. For the theater group, she had recently performed a ballet of Mozart's "The Magic Flute."

Bansen was not long for her flat on Delmar. She planned to buy into a collaborative housing development planned in the Central West End.

She didn't have much money but was willing to do anything, even scrub toilets, to be a part of the community, said people associated with the program.

The program had, only days before, hired her as its recycling coordinator to minimize construction waste.

It was to be her first paid job.

jkohler@post-dispatch.com 314-340-8337

Copyright 2005 St. Louis Post-Dispatch