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Downtown Eugene's DANGER ZONE.

Article Excerpt
Byline: DANGER AFOOT By Diane Dietz The Register-Guard

If Susan Wehner isn't careful, her mind reels with what-ifs.

What if on that rainy October night, Wehner and her partner of 13 years, Lucy Lahr, had stayed in the hospital at Lahr's mother's bedside another 10 minutes?

What if they weren't immersed in conversation about Lahr's mother's brush with death and had stayed a second longer on the curb - even though the walk signal was lit and they had the rightofway - allowing the beat-up pickup truck to pass them by?

What if the crosswalk were better lit, and the driver had seen the women in front of his hood through the condensation on his windshield?

"If there was more light on that corner, that could have saved our lives because it was dingy dark. It was an ugly night," Wehner said in a recent interview. "I know it would have helped."

Wehner would take any path away from that awful moment at 7:45 p.m. on Oct. 18 when she and Lahr were run down in the crosswalk on the southwest corner of the Sacred Heart Medical Center campus in Eugene, at the intersection of Hilyard Street and East 13th Avenue.

She's hard pressed to escape the memory. "It will never leave my mind," she said. "I saw her get dragged up the road under" the truck.

Inside the emergency room, Wehner, also hit by the truck, admonished doctors and nurses not to tell her what had happened to Lahr until a friend was present to help her. Her friend, Mary Fey, arrived and broke the news that Lucy had died.

"Directly after that, I heard the body...

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