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Family of man killed by bus announces plans to file lawsuit against MBTA
Hundreds of local residents signed a letter demanding officials address safety concerns in the area.
The family of a man who was hit and killed by an MBTA bus over the weekend at the Forest Hills stop announced on Thursday plans to file a wrongful death lawsuit against the MBTA.
Glenn Inghram, 63, was walking in a crosswalk when the bus took a left turn and ran him over, according to attorney Thomas Flaws of Altman Nussbaum Shunnarah trial attorneys.
“From what we’ve seen, the turn that the bus made into the crosswalk with a pedestrian in that crosswalk is a violation of Massachusetts law, and we need to hold the MBTA responsible for that,” Flaws said at a press conference in Boston Thursday.
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In an email statement to Boston.com, the MBTA said it is “cooperating with the District Attorney’s active investigation into the circumstances surrounding this incident.”
“Following safety-related incidents, it is standard procedure for bus/train operators to be removed from service while the investigative process advances,” the spokesperson wrote. “We send our condolences to the Inghram family during this time.”
Flaws, along with Inghram’s brother Ken and his niece Ashley, are demanding that urgent changes be made to the area around the MBTA station.
Nearby residents also wrote an open letter to the Massachusetts Department of Transportation, Boston Public Works, and the MBTA, following Inghram’s death, asking for the agencies to address safety concerns.
“We are united in asking for both longer-term and shorter-term answers to the worsening problem of pedestrian safety in Forest Hills — a call many of us have made in vain long before this tragic incident,” organizer Benjamin Siegel, who has been calling for safety improvements in the neighborhood for years, wrote in an email sent to officials Thursday morning.
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The letter, signed by 695 Jamaica Plain, Forest Hills, and Woodbourne residents, asks that the “dangerous and worsening infrastructure” be addressed with “greater haste” and expresses residents’ frustration with the continued postponements of community outreach meetings scheduled prior to the incident.
“We do not want our community’s safety continually jeopardized by a culture of delay,” the letter says.
The letter suggests seven temporary safety improvements: implementing a full pedestrian walk signal, extending pedestrian-only signal timing, installing curb extensions to improve visibility, reevaluating bus routing, increasing visibility around the bus exit, and placing temporary flex posts to delineate pedestrian spaces.
“Our neighbors were and are really distraught,” Siegel told Boston.com. “Many of us feel a great deal of anger as well. This is not a space that we haven’t called attention to in the past.”
On the day of the accident, Inghram left his beagle in his van while he picked up a sandwich from a local convenience store he was known to frequent.
He never made it back to his van.
Inghram was taken to Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center where he succumbed to his injuries.
The last time Ken Inghram saw his brother alive was on a visit to Maine in June. Inghram’s beagles Tarie Mae and Callie Ann accompanied the brothers on the trip.
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Ken said Inghram, who moved to Jamaica Plain from upstate New York about 20 years ago, was an active member of the community.
“Glenn was passionate about JP,” Ken said. “Everybody knew him.”
Inspired by his mother’s gardening, Inghram founded his own business, Glenn’s Gardening, in Jamaica Plain.
“He did that until the day he was hit by the bus,” Ken said.
Ken said he hopes Inghram’s death will “wake up some people that need to make the decisions to change that intersection.”
“Sometimes I feel it takes a death to effect change in this society,” Ken said. “I just don’t want this to be for nothing.”
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