'It's very awful': Pedestrian deaths put Las Vegas road safety in focus

LAS VEGAS — As he stood on the steps of the Regional Justice Center the morning of May 3, Arbor View senior Brayden Boulter didn’t talk about his plans for the future, his upcoming graduation ceremony or his last days as a high schooler.

Instead, he talked about what he called a “dangerous” crosswalk steps away from his high school in the northwest Las Vegas Valley.

That’s where one of Boulter’s senior classmates, McKenzie Scott, 18, was struck and killed by a suspected impaired driver while trying to cross the street a day earlier.

Boulter was at the downtown Las Vegas courthouse, along with a few other Arbor View High School students, to show support for Scott’s family and friends.

“It’s very awful there,” Boulter said. “When I used to walk to school every morning, you had to be very careful in that crosswalk. There needs to be better lights and better enforcement.”

Pedestrian safety has been squarely in the local media spotlight in the wake of Scott’s death and the May 6 death of pedestrian Joree Odabi, 23, of Las Vegas. Odabi was pronounced dead after being struck, police said, by an alleged impaired driver near Warm Springs Road and Torrey Pines Drive.

Days after Scott died, supporters came out for a “Justice for McKenzie” march near the crosswalk, which is on North Buffalo Drive in front of the school.

Ashley Brewer was one of them. Her son, a ninth-grader at Arbor View, was struck while riding his bicycle in the same crosswalk on April 11. He suffered a spiral fracture of his right leg, Brewer said.

“I would rather be here, being the one to get hurt, than have one of these kids get hit,” Brewer said that day. “With my son, the tires (of the Toyota) were inches from his head.”

‘Thankfully, outrage is possible’

Anytime a pedestrian dies in a traffic crash, it’s a tragedy, but Scott’s death seems to have struck a nerve.

“The community has responded in a way that tells me that, thankfully, outrage is possible,” said Erin Breen, long an advocate for pedestrian safety in the valley. “McKenzie Scott is one of a group of recent young people killed as vulnerable road users in our community.”

Breen is the director of the Road Equity Alliance Project, which is part of UNLV’s Transportation Research Center. For nearly 30 years, she’s fought to help make Las Vegas Valley roads safer.

“Walking has been an issue in southern Nevada for decades,” Breen said. “There hasn’t been a year that I’ve been in the traffic safety education business when we didn’t see the results of streets built for cars and not people.”

From the period from Jan. 1 through through May 4 in Las Vegas, according to Metropolitan Police Department statistics, pedestrian fatalities were actually down 19% from the same time in 2024, from 27 to 22.

But, as Breen points out, the 2024 totals — when there were 63 fatal pedestrian/vehicle crashes in Metro’s jurisdiction in 2024 — might not be the best year in which to gauge success or failure.

“In 2024, we came dangerously close to 100 pedestrian lives lost in all of Clark County,” Breen said. “The number was 97. By contrast, in 2009, there were 29.”

Still, the most recent statistics from the Nevada Department of Public Safety show that overall pedestrian deaths in Clark County for the first four months of 2025 were down 26% from the same period in 2024.

While Breen tends to veer toward calling out drivers as the main culprits, officer Robert Wicks, a Metro spokesperson, said pedestrians have to also be aware of their surroundings.

Of the fatal pedestrian crashes this year through May 7 in Metro’s jurisdiction, Wicks said, pedestrians were found to be at fault 60% of the time.

“A lot of times, people are crossing where they shouldn’t be crossing and that’s part of the issue,” Wicks said. “It’s a community-wide issue. It’s not just traffic and it’s not just pedestrians. Everybody has to be aware of what they’re doing and they have to abide by the laws.”

In the case where Brewer’s son was hit in the crosswalk outside Arbor View, a Metro police report stated that the boy “darted into the roadway,” which resulted in him being “found at fault.”

Brewer disagrees with the report’s finding. She said the past few weeks have been difficult and that she’s gone through bouts of anger, partly because she tried to warn of the dangers of the crosswalk before Scott’s death.

On April 25, Brewer sent an email to the Clark County School District Police Department’s traffic bureau. In the email, she called the stretch of Buffalo Drive in front of Arbor View “unsafe” and a “hostile environment.”

At the end of the email, she asks how she could go about petitioning for a crossing guard for the crosswalk “or at least some type of flashing lights for the crosswalk.”

Brewer said she never received a response to her email. A school district spokesperson, in an email, advised that a public records request would have to be made about the email for them to comment.

Possible solutions

In the wake of Scott’s death, a Las Vegas spokesperson Jace Radke said in an email that the city “is conducting a traffic study in the area, which will require the collection of data and take some time.”

“We can share that all the traffic control and safety devices, signage and crosswalks are functioning properly and are appropriately located around the school,” Radke said in the email.

Radke also said the city is in the middle of a pilot program that has crossing guards at Cimarron High School and Gibson Middle School. Some middle schools in the valley have crossing guards, but most do not.

As of this month, Cimarron is the only high school in the school district that has crossing guards.

The program — which is said to explore the effectiveness of having crossing guards at secondary schools and not just elementary schools — will run through the end of this month, Radke said.

Most experts seem to agree — the solution for having safer streets and sidewalks will likely need to be a multipronged effort.

It likely would need to include enhanced crosswalk infrastructure, more flashing lights, more attentive pedestrians and, yes, drivers who follow the law, stakeholders say.

“There’s a lot of things that go into it — education, enforcement and engineering,” Wicks said. “But things would be more under control if people followed the laws that are in place. We wouldn’t have as many fatalities.”