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Bike ride to memorialize cyclist struck and killed by car

01:00 AM EDT on Monday, September 1, 2008

By Katie Mulvaney

Journal Staff Writer

Lori DiBiasio is organizing a bicycle ride in memory of her longtime companion, Frank Cabral, who died after being hit by a motorist while bicycling along Route 1 in Charlestown last September.

The Providence Journal / John Freidah

A card celebrating 11 years since the day Lori M. DiBiasio and Frank J. Cabral met still sits on his pillow. The dining room table remains set for two, a candle at its center, plates awaiting food. Cabral’s worn canvas loafers rest by the door, nearly a year after his death.
Cabral was killed last Sept. 4, the day before that anniversary, when a motorist hit him as he rode his bike along Route 1 in Charlestown.
On Sept. 13, DiBiasio will mark his life with a 25.5-mile bicycle ride for experienced cyclists that is intended to remind motorists to share the road. The course will start and end at Matunuck Elementary School, in South Kingstown, with most of the loop on Route 1, a thoroughfare that cuts through South County.
“It’s really to help everyone else,” DiBiasio says. “People don’t pay enough attention to bicycles.”
Cabral called DiBiasio from their beach house in Matunuck at about 2:30 p.m. on Sept. 4 to say he was going for a ride and ask about dinner. DiBiasio was making a favorite: chicken thighs.
DiBiasio estimates that Cabral was eight miles into his ride when he was struck from behind as he rode on Route 1 south near Kings Factory Road.
A witness told police he saw a Buick Rendezvous, driven by Pamela J. Hurst, of Westerly, drift into the breakdown lane after passing two cars and travel about 200 feet in the lane before striking Cabral. The driver did not brake or slow down, he said.
Hurst told officers she had just left a meeting at Raytheon and had flipped her visor down after the sun shined in her eyes, court records show.
Cabral, 41, a building contractor and co-owner of Shoreline Properties, was pronounced dead at the scene.
Hurst, 60, was initially charged with driving to endanger, death resulting. But Attorney General Patrick C. Lynch’s office dismissed that charge in December, saying the evidence did not justify prosecution.
DiBiasio has filed a wrongful-death suit against Hurst in Washington County Superior Court. Hurst’s lawyer, Peter Clarkin, did not return a phone call seeking comment.
DiBiasio says she’s not seeking money, but justice. But mostly, she says, she wants to raise awareness about bicycle safety and urge motorists to better share the road.
She would like to see the state enact a law — she suggests calling it Frank’s Lane — that would require drivers to stay 5 feet away from bicyclists.
More than a dozen states, including Florida, Oklahoma and Utah, have enacted laws requiring motorists to pass cyclists at a specified distance, usually 3 feet.
In Rhode Island, on average one cyclist is killed by a motorist each year, according to Charles St. Martin, spokesman for the state Department of Transportation. Nationally, that number was 170 in 2006.
Once a dental hygienist, DiBiasio says she and Cabral met when a patient arranged for her to keep her motorcycle in his garage 12 years ago and that the two became inseparable, though they never married. Every piece of furniture and knickknack in their Sheffield Street house in Warwick, from a film canister filled with sand from various islands to a tiny figurine, reminds her of his hulking 6 foot, 5 inch, 275-pound frame and lust for life.
“I know it sounds corny, but we got high on life,” she says. They dreamed they would one day own a house on Block Island.
Cabral, she says, swam for an hour each morning in Warwick’s McDermott Pool and picked up bicycle riding about three years ago, preferring long, straight stretches where he could ride fast.
When she’d worry about him out on busy Route 1, he’d respond, “Honey, I’ve got to go. I’ve got to go,” she says.
In January 2007, his elbow was broken when a woman opened a car door in his path as he rode near the couple’s home in Lauderdale by the Sea, Fla. A staph infection complicated the healing process and his upper arm dwindled to a stick, she says.
After that accident, he assured her: “Honey, it would never happen twice,” she says.
DiBiasio’s stomach aches at the thought of Cabral’s death. The loss has devastated his mother, Sandra Cabral, who raised him alone as her only child, DiBiasio says.
She says she knows that people would advise her to pack his clothes and belongings away, but she’s not ready. She trolls his iPod to listen to the last songs he played on his ride. She keeps the shorts and shirt he planned to wear when he returned from his ride close at hand.
“It feels like a blink,” she says. “I just can’t believe that this happened.”
She reminds herself that Cabral wouldn’t want her to cry, which has motivated her to organize the ride and place a bench memorial at the Point Judith Lighthouse.
The ride itself — entitled Frank’s Ride — is not a fundraiser. In exchange for the $15 registration fee, the roughly 100 riders signed up will receive a T-shirt, memorial bracelet, and bumper sticker.
More information can be found at www.franksride.com.
[email-masked]

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