Every one of them
People killed walking in Encinitas
Fourteen people have been killed walking on Encinitas streets since 2016. Not on the freeway. On the streets the City designs, signs, lights and sets the speed on. Each one below is a person, a place, and a set of conditions we chose.
Were simply crossing the street
5 of them in a marked crosswalkPeople killed walking
Surface streets, 2016 to todayHappened after dark
2 drivers fled the sceneWhere it happened
Tap a number on the map or a row in the table to connect the two.
Locations are approximate. Collision reports place a crash by naming the nearest cross street and a distance from it, so each dot is the best reading of the report, not a surveyed point.
Every incident
Ordered oldest to newest. Tap any row for the full account and sources.
| Date | Location | Person | What they were doing | Officer’s primary factor | Coverage |
|---|
How this list was built
Where it comes from. California CCRS/SWITRS collision records for Encinitas (City Code 3782), plus three deaths we documented ourselves from Sheriff’s releases and local news because the state record does not carry them yet. The state back-fills city collisions many months late, so the most recent deaths always have to be added by hand. Those are marked.
Surface streets only. Deaths on Interstate 5 are counted in the state data for Encinitas but are left out here. The freeway belongs to Caltrans and the CHP, and nothing the City decides about its own streets changes what happens on it. This list is the deaths Encinitas can do something about.
On “crossing the street.” Someone counts as crossing whether or not they were in a marked crosswalk, because it is the same act either way: trying to reach the other side of a road. The crosswalk split is shown too, because that is the part people argue about. Two of the fourteen are not in the state record at all, so what they were doing comes from their documented accounts and from local knowledge of the site rather than from an officer’s code.
On the “primary factor.” This is the violation the responding officer wrote down. It is not a court finding, and it is often assigned to the person who was walking. Codes like 21954(a) and 21955 mean someone crossed outside a crosswalk. Read down the list and a pattern shows up: people crossing wide, fast roads after dark, at places where the nearest marked crossing is a long walk away. That is a description of how a street was built, not only of a choice someone made in their last moments.
Corrections welcome. If you knew one of these people, or you saw what happened, and something here is wrong or missing, please tell us. Several of these fourteen are still just a line in a database, with no name and no story attached, and that is the part we most want to fix.