By Victor Greto
Sometimes it takes a child to make a village.
For two years, since two nearby subdivisions sprang up, neighbors on Northwest 15th Street in Spring Valley have been complaining about speeders racing up and down their block, to no avail.
The short block of $160,000 to $200,000 homes, squeezed between Dykes Road and 163rd Avenue, is the only through street in the area with neither traffic lights nor speed bumps.
Residents, children, dogs and ducks have been dodging speeding trucks and cars, some not as successfully as others.
“It’s been awful because the cars go through here at 60 miles an hour,” says Ruth Lubin, 72, who has lived in the neighborhood for four years. “I’m not exaggerating.”
The situation finally came to a head in late January, when an 8-year-old boy fractured his leg while trying to avoid being hit by a speeding car.
The accident has galvanized neighbors to work together.
Every weekend, they illegally park on the street to slow traffic while their children have posted speed warnings.
And tonight, when their homeowners association meets to consider speed bumps for their street, neighbors say they will rally en masse to persuade the association’s board to finally act.
Second-grader Andre Pruna might seem an unlikely catalyst for such grass-roots action.
Andre was biking up Northwest 15th Street on Saturday afternoon, Jan. 22, when he saw a speeding car out of the corner of his eye.
He swerved toward the curb, falling and breaking his left leg in two places. He didn’t know it at first. His leg hurt the rest of the day and Sunday.
When he woke up to go to school Monday morning, it hurt so bad his mother, Maria, took him to the hospital.
There, Andre got a cast on his leg and was placed in a wheelchair, where he must remain for several more weeks. His cast will be on for 12 more weeks; four weeks of therapy will follow that.
“He gets antsy now,” his mother says. “He was a very active boy, and, when he sees other kids outside playing, he wants to play, too.”
Since his accident, Andre and about six neighborhood friends spend each Saturday or Sunday afternoon sitting to the side of Northwest 15th Street holding up a crude plank, with white, irregularly painted words that read: “Speeder broke my leg. Was it you?”
“The sign and staying out on the street were all the kids’ idea,” says Maria Pruna, 38, a credit manager and mother of two other children, 18 and 20. It started with Briana Mashburn, 12, who lives on the corner near Andre.
Briana says she and her friend, Kelly Zimmerman, 11, both worked on the sign, and she vows to stand vigil with Andre “until we get speed bumps.”
The kids have inspired their parents.
On weekends, neighbors illegally park their cars on the narrow street, just to slow the traffic.
It works. Sort of. The cars slow down to read the sign set up alongside Andre, then squeeze through the parked cars. But watch the street, say between 7 and 8 a.m. or 5 and 7 p.m. on a weekday, “and you just won’t believe it,” said Helen Zimmerman, a neighbor and mother of three, including Kelly.
Helen Zimmerman said last November she saw a motorist plow through a covey of ducks, killing one of them.
Her husband, Wayne, drove after the culprit, took down the license number and called police. “They said they couldn’t do anything,” she said.
Shortly after that, a neighbor’s dog was killed. Then another dog was injured.
“Yes, I know there are leash laws concerning dogs,” Zimmerman says, “but sometimes, when you open your door, the dog may run out. Sometimes [neighbors] go out to tell the drivers to slow down. They give you the finger, or they’ll speed up.”
Since November, Wayne Zimmerman has clocked drivers with his own speed gun. “I was out Tuesday night.” he says. “Fourteen out of 15 drivers were going over 40 miles an hour.”
Neighbor Alvin Lubin says the problem began in the fall of 1997, when the Shoma and Waterside developments were being built. Trucks filled with construction materials barreled down Northwest 15th Street.
According to Lubin, their homeowners association never asked the city of Pembroke Pines to divert construction traffic off their street. However, the Broward County Engineering Division did install 30-mph speed-limit signs and banned through truck traffic.
Neighbors asked police to start issuing tickets. But, they said, Police Chief Gary Ewing told them that because Northwest 15th Street is a private street, officers cannot issue traffic citations for such non-criminal traffic offenses as speeding. But they can issue parking tickets. So, when the neighbors began parking illegally on the street after Andre was hit, Helen Zimmerman says the police threatened to ticket them. However, she says, they backed off after neighbors explained what they were doing.
Jerry Cristodero, president of the Spring Valley Master Association, Inc., says residents of both Northwest 15th and 12th streets have sent the association petitions to have speed bumps put in.
“Some of the board is afraid there’s a legality issue here,” he says, “because they’ve heard that some people have sued associations about putting bumps in because it’s an inconvenience.”
There are speed bumps on other streets in Spring Valley, and Cristodero says the the issue of putting them on Northwest 15th Street is really about one or two recalcitrant board members. “Some of these board members are looking at it from their own point of view, not who they represent,” he says.
Zimmerman acknowledges those who want the speed bumps have not shown at association meetings to make enough noise. But, she says, when the association meets tonight , they will be out in numbers.
To make a point, she has made a photo collage of the neighborhood’s children. “I didn’t realize there were so many children on this block. Thirty-five!” she says. Because of Andre, Zimmerman says, “This block is united, it’s a family. This is how it’s going to be until they fix the problem.”