Columbia Daily Tribune

Cautionary tale in St. Louis could sadly happen here, too
By TONY MESSENGER
Published Sunday, November 20, 2005

Lisi Bansen just wanted to get from here to there.

The 40-year-old St. Louisan was traveling from her home, a tiny flat on Delmar Boulevard, to a corner store not far away. For most of us, the quaint walk on an old street with broken-up cement would have been no big deal.

For Bansen, it was a daily ordeal.

Her wheelchair wouldn’t operate properly on the long-neglected sidewalk. So she did what many folks like her do several times a day. She took to the street in her wheelchair to take a short trip most of us take for granted.

A driver of an SUV who didn’t see her ended Bansen’s life.

In Columbia, Bansen’s friends mourned. But more than that, they wondered when a similar tragedy could strike here.

"Lisi would be in the forefront, could she get our attention, in pointing out where improvements are needed, here in Columbia, right now, to keep others from risking being killed as she was," David Finke says.

Finke met Bansen at the Columbia Friends Meeting, a congregation of Quakers that Bansen attended when she lived in our city a few short years ago.

Bansen came to Columbia specifically, her friends say, after researching and determining that it was a generally accessible city for people in wheelchairs and finding that it had a strong Quaker community. When she arrived, she discovered that even a progressive city such as ours has its danger areas for people who depend on good sidewalks for transportation.

Bansen worked with Sandy Matsuda at the University of Missouri-Columbia to help teach her students in occupational therapy. As part of the students’ training, Matsuda would match them with Bansen or other wheelchair users for a day, so they could find out what sort of real-life difficulties await folks with disabilities in Columbia.

Matsuda says Bansen was insistent in her advocacy for disability rights.

"She was such an exuberant person," she remembers. In her travels with Matsuda’s students, Bansen would point out the poor condition of sidewalks in certain areas of the city. There are plenty of streets in Columbia where wheelchair users come across a bad patch of sidewalk that forces them to the street if they want to get from here to there.

"When you see somebody in the street in a wheelchair, there’s usually a good reason," Matsuda says. She thinks about her friend in St. Louis, who died a horrible death. It wasn’t the driver’s fault. It wasn’t Bansen’s fault. It was a situation that came about because of simple neglect.

"The situation where she was living was really treacherous. The reason she was in the street is the same reason a lot of people in wheelchairs are in the street. It’s the only path they’ve got," she says.

Finke and others have been working to change that situation in Columbia. In fact, Matsuda says, the city has been responsive and takes such concerns seriously. But the people who knew Bansen and are mourning her Nov. 2 death know that more can be done.

"This St. Louis story is in many ways a Columbia story," wrote Lee Henson, the university’s Americans with Disabilities Act coordinator, in a letter to Columbia’s Disabilities Commission. "I wonder, for example, about the people who avoid the sidewalks on the north side of Walnut between College Avenue and William Street, and between Paquin and downtown, and along Providence and Garth, and about the lack of sidewalks along the Business Loop. I wonder how many of our friends and acquaintances who use wheelchairs find themselves having to use the streets because too many Columbia sidewalks in older neighborhoods are unsafe and unreliable."

Finke, who was chairman of the city’s Human Rights Commission when it produced an ordinance prohibiting discrimination based on physical handicap, believes Bansen’s death should be a rallying cry for our city to do more, particularly in light of the roads and sidewalks tax that city residents approved earlier this month.

"Our job, now, as I see it," Finke says, "is to learn from all this, to see what blind spots we may have, what grievances must be addressed, what life-threatening hazards must be corrected immediately. This would be a fitting beginning of how we may continue to honor Lisi Bansen’s life and give thanks for all that she gave us."

The lesson that Bansen left us is that getting there from here can sometimes be an arduous task.

Failure isn’t an option.

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Tony Messenger is a columnist at the Tribune. His column appears on Sunday and Tuesday through Thursday. He can be reached at 815-1728 or by e-mail at tmessenger@tribmail.com.
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Copyright © 2005 The Columbia Daily Tribune.