Wednesday evenings for James Andereggen and his two daughters, Kaylee and Lauren, have always been reserved for family dinners. This past Wednesday on Aug. 21, the plan was to grab Chipotle together.

The 43-year-old Pixar Employee was walking to the Emery Go-Round station en route to BART to return to his home in Oakley. He was crossing Hollis at 45th in the northern crosswalk when the unimaginable happened.

“I had been texting him and calling him and he wasn’t answering,” said Kaylee. “So I texted my stepmom asking if she had heard anything, because it was strange that he wasn’t answering. I had a feeling something was wrong.”

It was around 4 p.m. when Kaylee’s stepmother informed her that her father had been struck by a truck. It dawned on Kaylee that it must have been while her father was on foot.

That was my dad. Thank you so much. He is doing a bit better now, you quite possibly saved his life. ❤️😭 — kaylee (@KAndereggen) August 22, 2019

Emeryville City Councilmember John Bauters was a witness to the incident and captured the traumatic event in a tweet. Bauters observed Andereggen walking toward the stop when he was struck by a truck. Bauters immediately called emergency personnel while administering care and noted that “[the victim’s] head was bleeding badly.”

Emeryville Police Department had dispatch relay the call and an officer was on the scene within minutes. Emergency medical services arrived shortly after and transported Andereggen to Highland Hospital with a head injury.

“My stepmom rushed to the hospital and then me and my sister went to go see him,” recalled Kaylee. “I could tell he was in a lot of pain. The man who hit him was distracted and he was very remorseful. He actually went to visit my dad in the hospital, so that was nice.”

Kaylee said her father was discharged from the hospital around midnight on Thursday. He returned back home with his family to begin his recovery.

“He’s still in a lot of pain so they’re just trying to keep his pain stable,” said Kaylee. “He was bleeding from his brain, so they’re just trying to keep an eye on that.”



﻿Andereggen hopes to back at work within the next month.Shortly after the accident, Councilmember Bauters tweeted that at “our 9/3 Council Mtg I will request that council agenda pedestrian safety at 45th and Hollis Streets immediately and refer it to the Transportation & Public Works Committee comprised of myself” and Mayor Ally Medina. He included #VisionZero, which Bauters said is not some tagline but Emeryville’s mission.Vision Zero is a strategy using a multidisciplinary approach to address and eliminate all traffic fatalities and severe injuries. Working with sponsors like Kaiser Permanente, Vision Zero is seeking to reduce the alarming number – more than 40,000 – of Americans involved in fatal traffic-related accidents.After watching the footage taken by KRON4 of the Hollis and 45th intersection, Kaylee noticed how dangerous the environment looks.“I mean, it’s crazy — there’s stop signs and no one stops,” she pointed out. “It’s not worth it just to change the song or look at a text. My dad’s lucky. It could’ve been a lot worse.“Even though people should know that pedestrians always have the right of way, I think there should be lights and crosswalk signals in that intersection.”



Andereggen is employed as a building engineer at nearby Pixar Animation Studios where he has worked for more than a decade. Andereggen has an IMDB credit to his name for his involvement as a facility operations crew-member for some of Pixar’s most beloved films including Inside Out, Monsters University, Brave and Up.

Kaylee said her father enjoys working at Pixar and has brought both his daughters to campus for tours. Andereggen says he’s hopeful to be back at work within a month.

Bauters noted he hopes to bring the issue of traffic calming at the intersection before council when they reconvene in September.

Feature Image: James Andereggen and his two daughters 17-year-old Kaylee and 14-year-old Lauren (Photo: Facebook).

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