John Tuohy, and Tony Cook

IndyStar

Police found Amohd Welbon-Cook’s body in a dark ditch.

The 19-year-old had finished a double shift at McDonald’s on June 28, 2015. He was saving money to attend college and buy a car.

But those dreams vanished during his walk home, on a mile-long stretch of Georgetown Road, when a blue Chevrolet Avalanche struck Welbon-Cook, knocking him from the shoulder of the road.

The motorist told police he hadn’t seen Welbon-Cook in his brown and yellow work uniform. Investigators identified the teenager by going to the nearest McDonald’s.

In other cities, the motorist might have noticed a pedestrian walking along a busy, high-speed street such as Georgetown Road because it likely would have been illuminated by the most basic of city services — a streetlight.

But not in Indianapolis.

Here, city officials stopped adding streetlights more than 35 years ago to save money on the city’s $2.9 million annual electric bill. Compounding the problem, they also failed to build any new sidewalks for 20 years during that time.

It has made for a lethal combination.

An IndyStar investigation found that 585 pedestrians have been killed in Marion County since the streetlight ban in 1980. Last year, 27 pedestrians were run down, more than in any year since the moratorium started.

The vast majority of those killed, including Welbon-Cook, were struck at night, usually on streets lacking lights, sidewalks or, as in the case of that stretch along Georgetown Road, both.

Victims across the city include a nursing assistant walking before sunrise along an unlit portion of Westlane Road on the northwest side; a handyman on his way home from a VFW Post on West 34th Street near Moller Road; an elementary school student walking to a bus stop on Troy Avenue; and a 16-year-old on his way to a Thanksgiving dinner on 34th Street near Lafayette Road.

Their deaths not only raise questions about whether the city is doing enough to protect its residents, but also call into question the city’s spending priorities over the years.

While streetlight and sidewalk construction stalled, billions of dollars flowed to grand Downtown developments, generally celebrated by politicians, the business community and the media as improvements to the city’s quality of life.

Bankers Life Fieldhouse. Circle Centre. The Indiana Convention Center.

Those spending choices no doubt spruced up Downtown, boosted the local economy and enhanced the city’s national standing as a metropolis on the move. Still, some civic activists argue that it came at the expense of neighborhoods left with crumbling and dangerous passageways. Today, the city pays $5.1 million a year to maintain its lights, just a ripple in the city’s $1.1 billion budget.

Since Indianapolis’ streetlight freeze, the city’s population has surged by 180,000 — that’s more than the number of people now living in Fishers and Carmel combined — mostly on the city’s largely unlit outskirts.

Some experts on local government said the decadeslong refusal to spend money on such a basic need is startling.

“Streetlights are something you expect in an urbanized area,” said Paul Helmke, a former Fort Wayne mayor and director of the Civic Leaders Center at Indiana University in Bloomington. “It’s a public safety issue, as well as a quality of life issue. It’s so our kids go out and play and not worry about getting hit by a car. It’s not up there with police and fire protection as an expectation, but it’s close.”

Many residents and civic groups in Marion County, who have complained about deadly streets for years, say they’ve given up hope that the city will respond.

“There is zero pedestrian safety out here,” said Anna Peay, secretary of the Rockville, High School, Girls School Road Neighborhood Association. “They take from the poor and give to the rich. We so desperately need city services. But they tax us and send it all Downtown.”

Four pedestrians have been struck and killed after dark in Peay’s neighborhood since 2005. They include an 85-year-old man who was run over while checking his mailbox on a street with no sidewalks or lights and a 12-year-old girl who was hit and killed while roller-skating.

“Noticed that there is no street lighting in the area making the area extremely dark,” an Indianapolis police officer wrote in her report on the girl’s death.

For some, the consequences of the lack of service are irreversible.

“This has been so hard for me just to grasp,” said Welbon-Cook’s aunt, Kirmile Lewis, with whom he lived. “I know that accidents happen, but I’m still trying to find out exactly what happened and why.”

Dark roads, grim deaths

In June, Mayor Joe Hogsett ended the moratorium and announced he would add 100 streetlights across the city. But the primary focus of that program has been to prevent crime, not reduce pedestrian deaths.

Hogsett, however, acknowledged that dark streets probably contributed to pedestrian deaths.

When presented with IndyStar’s findings recently, Hogsett said it was “entirely likely” that the city’s lack of streetlights was a factor in the large number of nighttime deaths.

“This is a public safety issue of enormous magnitude,” he said. “The time is long overdue for the lifting of the moratorium. There are many neighborhoods that are just dark and noticeably so ... it is incredibly dark here.”

But the 100 streetlights the mayor proposes still leave Indianapolis far short of other cities.

With 29,000 streetlights over 352 square miles, Indianapolis, a city of 853,000, has far fewer streetlights than other midsize Midwestern cities with much smaller areas.

Minneapolis, with 410,000 residents in just 58 square miles, has 48,000 streetlights. Milwaukee, a city of 600,000 in 96 square miles, has 77,000 streetlights. Detroit, with 138 square miles and a population of 677,000, has 65,000 lights.

And the streetlights Indianapolis does have are spread so thin they are often ineffective, a transportation consultant found earlier this year. Nelson Nygaard, of San Francisco, determined that lights here should be spaced 150 feet apart. Most are more than 200 feet apart. Outside the city center, most roadways are lit only at intersections, if at all. The result is broad swaths of unlit pavement.

IndyStar’s analysis found that 70 percent of fatalities since 2001 happened after dark in Marion County, and more than two-thirds of those were on streets police classified as “unlighted.” The overall death rate puts Indianapolis in the middle of the 50 largest cities, and its nighttime fatalities are about the national average. But the deadly strikes in unlit areas at night far exceed those in other cities, according to U.S. Department of Transportation records.

If there is a statistical analysis that best drives home the point, it is perhaps this: In urban areas, pedestrian deaths on dark, unlit streets accounted for 27 percent of their overall pedestrian deaths during the past 15 years. But here, they accounted for 49 percent. The difference? If Marion County reflected that average for urban areas, 50 fewer people would have been killed.

The pitch-black streets here also could help explain this gruesome fact: Pedestrians in at least a half-dozen fatal cases were run over several times after being struck.

In October 2014, Michael Fink, a handyman at the Veterans of Foreign Wars post near Moller Road, was walking home along 34th Street when a car struck him at 8 p.m. and kept going.

On his stomach but still alive, Fink, 68, tried to crawl across the street. A group of teenagers rushed out to help him, but before they could get there, another car ran over Fink. Then another. And another.

“There are accidents over there all the time,” Teresa Randolph, a bartender at the VFW for 20 years, said of the dim, high-traffic, two-lane street. “If the first car had seen him and stopped, he might have lived.”

On May 22, 2015, Michael Tyson, a 38-year-old father of three, was walking home on 56th Street west of Georgetown when he was run over, struck several more times and dragged hundreds of feet.

“I was up there that night, and it is a very dark part of the road,” said Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department crash investigator Sgt. Doug Heustis, a 32-year veteran. “There are some dark parts of the city, and that is one of them. He was dragged twice under the car. There’s good physical evidence he was hit three times but likely more.”

Heustis’ fatal crash team had been to that same location before.

Seven years earlier, 28-year-old Jenine Jackson and her daughter, Brionna Butler, 5, were struck and killed while crossing the street at night.

Dollars over safety?

Indianapolis already had a shortage of streetlights in 1980 when Mayor Bill Hudnut enacted the ban to save money while energy prices were rising during the OPEC oil crisis.

The economy recovered, but the moratorium stayed in place through seven subsequent mayoral terms.

“The city’s not in the lighting business,” Mayor Stephen Goldsmith declared in 1996, more than 16 years after the ban began. “We don’t pay for water and gas; why should we pay for lights?”

Former Mayor Greg Ballard said the ban was “something that was respected through the years” by mayors, including himself, during eight years in office. Like Hudnut, he said his was a monetary decision.

“We had limited resources. We went through a recession and had reduced revenue every year,” Ballard said. “There were a lot of basic city functions we couldn’t get to. And we had some big stuff to do. We needed money for public works, to fix parks, for a lot of things.”

The city has gone so long without a streetlight program that officials in the Hogsett administration are having a difficult time determining where streetlights are needed most or even locating records on existing lights.

“The city doesn’t have that (ability) right now. Other cities do,” said Thomas Cook, Hogsett’s chief of staff.

Compounding the danger for people on foot is a shortage of sidewalks, thanks to a 20-year period in which none was built. Now it would take $750 million just to bring sidewalks to main thoroughfares. Not surprisingly, IndyStar found example after example of pedestrians who were killed walking in the street on blocks without sidewalks.

“Nothing’s changed”

Kessler Boulevard East Drive in Broad Ripple is one of the city’s most heavily traveled streets, but it lacks sidewalks for much of the 1½-mile stretch between College and Keystone avenues. The area is only dimly lit, and sloping front lawns lap onto the curbs in many parts.

That corridor, at Crestview Avenue, is where Thomas Abell, a 27-year-old hospital lab assistant and marathon runner, was struck and killed by a hit-and-run driver at 3 a.m. on June 28, 2015.

Michael Abell said his brother was probably on his way to spend the night at his house. Abell’s sister-in-law, Kristin Abell, said she wonders what role the dangerously dark conditions played.

“Who is to say that (drivers) can even see these people,” she said. “I think sidewalks and streetlights are a huge thing.”

Police arrested then-27-year-old Jayme Murphy two weeks later after a friend saw a head-sized dent with hair in the windshield of Murphy's brown Ford Taurus.

Murphy was found guilty in April of felony fleeing a deadly accident and obstructing justice and was sentenced to 4½ years.

“What expense can you put on life?” Michael Abell asked. “That should be the priority, not money. If our lawmakers ever asked us, we would say we want safer streets.”

For some residents touched by accidents, the unimproved, dangerous streets stick to them like a scar.

Brandon Hughes was 14 years old in 2002 when he was walking to Thanksgiving dinner with his 16-year-old cousin, Keanton Hayes.

On a dark stretch along 34th Street near Lafayette Road, a fast-moving car approached them from behind.

“I could feel the ‘whoosh’ of it right next to me,” said Hughes, now a 28-year-old fast-food restaurant worker. “It was about 2 inches away.”

The car missed Hughes but clipped Hayes and knocked him onto the grass in front of Barnes United Methodist Church.

Stunned, Hughes ran to a nearby Village Pantry to seek aid. But when he returned with a helper, they couldn’t find his cousin, known as “K.C.”

“It was so dark I couldn’t see anything,” Hughes said. “The person was not believing me. I didn’t know if he got up and left or what happened.”

But then Hughes saw small puffs of steam rising from the grass and knew he’d found his “best friend.” They were K.C.’s last breaths.

Hughes said the boys were walking in the street because a narrow and inconsistent sidewalk was 20 feet from the street and was even darker.

“It was several months before I could walk by there,” said Hughes, who still lives only blocks from the site. “But nothing’s changed much.”

Left in the dark: How we got here

An unusually high number of Indianapolis pedestrians are struck and killed after dark on roads without streetlights.

An IndyStar investigation has found that the city’s 35-year ban on new streetlights likely contributed to the death toll. A 20-year pause on new sidewalk construction made the streets even more dangerous. Today, police and fire protection, street paving and pothole-filling receive more than 90 percent of the city’s $1.1 billion annual budget, while streetlights, a basic service in most cities, get a relative pittance of less than 1 percent.

The neglect has left the city with a desultory grid of dark streets and a huge infrastructure deficit from which it may be impossible to recover. How Indianapolis got to this point is a study in fiscal and public safety priorities. Here’s a brief history:

No more lights

Mayor William Hudnut imposed the moratorium in 1980 during oil shortages and a national recession. At that time, the city was paying about $2.9 million a year to electrify roughly 32,000 lights. It was also in the middle of a 10-year program to add new lights. But even as the economy picked up steam and oil began flowing again, Hudnut kept the ban in place, citing reduced gas tax revenues and rising electricity costs.

Other priorities

While Hudnut told residents they would have to do without new streetlights, he found $47.2 million to help pay for the roughly $80 million Hoosier Dome, which became home to the city’s first professional football team in 1984. That money came from a bond issuance backed by a 1 percent tax on food and beverage sales. The new tax generated $3.5 million a year — more than the city’s entire streetlight electricity bill. Because of several refinancings, taxpayers will continue to pay off the debt until 2021, even though the arena — later known as the RCA Dome — was torn down in 2008.

John Krause, deputy mayor under Hudnut from 1982 to 1990, said the streetlight moratorium was a way to cut costs when the budget was tight. “I’m surprised to hear it’s still in effect,” he said before Mayor Joe Hogsett lifted it this summer.

Studies and more studies

The ban was not popular with residents clamoring for safer streets. A survey in 1984 found that more residents — 1 in 3 — were concerned about street lighting than street paving. Hudnut promised to look into the issue, and the city authorized several studies in the late 1980s at a cost of more than $400,000. Those studies found that the city could save millions of dollars a year by purchasing the lights from Indianapolis Power & Light Co. instead of leasing them. The savings could then be used to purchase additional streetlights. But the city never acted on those findings.

In 1990, Hudnut quietly stopped constructing new sidewalks, too.

Other mayors follow suit

Hudnut, the longest-serving mayor in Indianapolis history, set a precedent that would continue for more than three decades. Every mayor over the next 35 years would honor the streetlight ban while focusing on big-ticket projects, mostly Downtown.Those priorities included Lucas Oil Stadium, the Indiana Convention Center, Bankers Life Fieldhouse and Victory Field. The projects undoubtedly established the city as a sports and convention capital and helped add 180,000 new residents.

Getting out of the lighting business

Hudnut’s successor, Stephen Goldsmith, not only kept the lights ban in place — he sought to abdicate the city’s responsibility for streetlights. He took a plan to the state legislature that would have turned over all streetlight obligations to IPL. The plan would have allowed IPL to pay for the lights with a new fee on residents’ electricity bills, while freeing up city tax money for other purposes. The plan got some traction but ultimately met resistance in the General Assembly and failed to advance.

In a recent interview, Goldsmith, now director of the Innovations in American Government Program at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, said he still thinks his plan was the best way to pay for lights. Although he was surprised the moratorium lasted so long, the prevalence of deaths in the dark didn’t surprise him, he said.

“I confess to not being successful,” he said. “For me, streetlights are a public good. I never understood why property taxes should be the sole source.”

A few exceptions

Goldsmith’s successor, Mayor Bart Peterson, made a few small exceptions to the ban. After 14-year-old Hector Huerta was struck and killed while skateboarding on Bridgeport Road in 2002, neighbors and some of his classmates came together to demand streetlights in the area. Peterson ordered three streetlights installed at intersections on the busy two-lane road. Still, there was no comprehensive program to address the massive street maintenance deficit left by the decadesold ban.

Today, the city has a few thousand fewer streetlights — about 29,000 — than it did in 1980.

An influx of funds

Even when Peterson’s successor, Mayor Greg Ballard, attacked the city’s crumbling infrastructure with an unprecedented surge of spending, lights were not part of the equation. In 2010, after selling the city water and sewer utilities, Ballard launched a $430 million road repair program called Rebuild Indy. The bulk of the money paid for badly needed street paving and bridge repairs, though a significant chunk did go to sidewalks, ending the 20-year pause to new walkways.

Streetlights didn’t make the cut.

Money found for other projects

As Ballard continued the streetlight moratorium, his administration found $6 million to invest in a private electric car rental program, $5 million to build a cricket field and $20 million to spend on plans for a new criminal justice center that was never built.

His last year in office was the deadliest for pedestrians since the freeze on streetlights, with at least 27 fatalities.

A fiscally conservative approach

At the end of last year, new IPL rates resulted in savings that would have allowed the city to install 1,000 new streetlights without spending more than in past years. But Mayor Joe Hogsett, who took office earlier this year, has decided to add just 100 new streetlights. The new lights will be focused in high-crime areas, though pedestrian safety will also be a factor.

Thomas Cook, the mayor’s chief of staff, said the city didn’t want to spend the rest of the savings — more than $300,000 a year — until it has a chance to formulate a long-term plan.

Big challenge ahead

Even with 100 additional lights, Indianapolis faces a nearly insurmountable infrastructure challenge. With only 29,500 streetlights — half the number as in cities of comparable population and area — the city would need tens of thousands of new lights to catch up. And even with Ballard’s sidewalk-building program, the city needs an additional $750 million to build sidewalks along major roads.

Call IndyStar reporter John Tuohy at (317) 444-6418. Follow him on Twitter: @john_tuohy.

Call IndyStar reporter Tony Cook at (317) 444-6081. Follow him on Twitter: @indystartony.