It was still dark when Sherry Nowotarski pedaled onto the Park Boulevard Bridge that morning, a headlight on her handlebar lighting the way.
As she rode up the bridge’s shoulder, Nowotarski, 60, was the next-to-last cyclist in a group of riders heading west across the Pinellas County drawbridge that spans the Intracoastal Waterway, between the mainland and the town of Indian Shores.
Her friend Patrick Hodgson was just behind her.
“I believe her last words to me were, ‘Are you back there, Patrick?’ ” Hodgson recalled.
Typical Sherry, friends said. Always checking on the people behind her.
A minute later, Hodgson recalls, Nowotarski rolled across the metal grating of the drawbridge span and then began to drift toward a metal slot in the pavement — a structural joint, running parallel with the direction of traffic, just wide enough for a bicycle tire.
What happened in the seconds that followed left Nowotarski’s family and friends stunned and grieving, and prompted fellow cyclists to call on the county to make the bridge safer.
Before Hodgson could call out a warning, Nowotarski was riding into the joint, then falling.
That early morning ride on Oct. 13 should have been another routine outing for Nowotarski, a chance to spend time with friends and log miles to fine-tune her fitness ahead of an upcoming triathlon.
Born in Indiana and raised in Reading, Pa., she’d started running in her 20s and had always been active and fit, winning the Miss Reading title in 1978 and later competing for Miss Pennsylvania, according to her daughters, Kaitlyn and Alyssa Kirkpatrick.
Nowotarski and her two girls moved to Seminole in 2009. A single mother, she worked as an administrative assistant at the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office and waited tables at a Largo Applebee’s.
“She was a devoted, hard-working mother,” Kaitlyn Kirkpatrick said.
At the Sheriff’s Office, where she processed citations and payroll, Nowotarski often came to the office on weekends to make sure the work got done, said her supervisor, Lt. Alyson Henry.
“She loved her job, the agency and the deputies that work here,” Henry said.
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Nowotarski got into cycling about five years ago, then started swimming when she wanted to try triathlons. She enjoyed the challenge and camaraderie.
Among a core group of four friends who called themselves the Pooh Bear Bunch, Nowotarski earned the nickname Tigger — sweet, playful and boundlessly energetic.
“I never met anyone so loving, so cheerful,” said one of the friends, Lisa Cavanaugh. “If you were in a bad mood, it never lasted with her. She made it her thing to get you out of that rotten mood.”
Nowotarski earned a reputation in the local cycling community as someone you wanted along for the ride. She had a knack for encouraging and motivating people through tough spots, and she chatted through most rides, peppering new acquaintances with questions.
Along with the two jobs and attending weekly service at St. Jerome Catholic Church in Largo, Nowotarski made time to ride, run and swim enough to get in shape for long-distance charity rides and triathlons. She regularly headed out hours before dawn to get in miles before work.
The events she participated in the last couple of years showed her progression. She started with half-Ironman triathlons, then in November in Panama City finished her first full Ironman: a 2.4-mile swim, 112 miles on the bike and a 26.2-mile run.
In January, Nowotarski volunteered for and rode in the St. Petersburg edition of the annual Florida Honor Ride organized by Project Hero, a nonprofit organization that helps veterans recover from traumatic injuries and PTSD. In April, she rode in her first Project Hero Challenge Ride in Texas, a five-day, 300-mile trip that began in Austin and ended in Fort Worth.
Mother Nature unleashed a cold, rainy headwind on that trip, but Nowotarski’s sunny demeanor never dimmed, recalled Mitch Lee, who leads the Pinellas chapter of the group.
“You would never know that the weather had turned, not from Sherry,” he said. “All the veterans just immediately took to her.”
She enjoyed the ride so much, she rode the Great Lakes edition in August.
When she clipped into her pedals for the early morning ride on Oct. 13, Nowotarski was training for her next race: a Half Ironman in Wilmington, N.C., on Oct. 23.
The training ride would take the group over the Park Boulevard Bridge. Nowotarski didn’t like drawbridges like that one, where the Intracoastal’s swirling waters are visible through the span’s metal grating. She once saw a rider fall on the rain-slicked grating of the old Tierra Verde drawbridge, so she knew to ride with caution, friends said.
But according to riders with Nowotarski that morning, it wasn’t the grating that caused her to fall.
Built in 1979, the Park Boulevard Bridge is a double-leaf bascule bridge: two spans that rise to let tall boat traffic pass. The bridge features two lanes each for eastbound and westbound traffic and wide shoulders on each side.
On two corners of each leaf are structural joints where the fixed portion of the bridge and the movable spans come together, Pinellas County spokesman Tony Fabrizio said in an email.
There are two joints each on the eastbound shoulder and westbound shoulders, just before and after the metal grating. Each joint is about 1½ inches wide and an inch deep, and roughly the length of a small car.
Fabrizio noted other Pinellas drawbridges maintained by the county, such as the Dunedin Causeway and the Beckett Bridge in Tarpon Springs, feature different designs and don’t have similar joints.
The Park Boulevard bridge features a pedestrian walkway along its north side, separated from the westbound shoulder by a waist-high concrete wall. A yellow, diamond-shaped sign at the start of the bridge advises cyclists: “Walk bicycles across draw span.”
That’s an advisory, not a legal obligation.
In Florida, the bicycle is legally defined as a vehicle, and bicyclists must obey the same traffic laws as the drivers of other vehicles. On spans like the Park Boulevard Bridge, where there is no designated bike lane, cyclists can legally use the travel lanes or the shoulder.
Cyclists like Paul Zagami, a friend of Nowotarski’s who also has crashed by riding into one of the Park Boulevard Bridge joints and has seen others fall there, said walking across the span is not practical for many cyclists.
The pedestrian sidewalk is relatively narrow and can barely accommodate two-way pedestrian traffic when at least one party is walking a bike.
Another factor: Many cyclists also wear shoes with cleats that clip into pedals and make walking difficult.
Riding a bike across the metal grating requires caution, but is manageable, cyclists say. But a slot that runs parallel with the direction of traffic and is just wide and deep enough for a road bike tire is a different sort of hazard.
“Once your tire gets in it, you can’t get out, and you’re on the ground,” Zagami said.
Zagami said he routinely points out the joints on the Park Boulevard Bridge to other cyclists. He did just that on the Oct. 13 ride, pulling to the front so he could flag the joints for a few cyclists new to the ride. But at that point, the nine riders had split into two smaller groups, and Nowotarski was in the second group.
Friends said she was aware of the joints, but still managed to find herself in one that morning.
The group of riders approached the bridge about 6 a.m. Two other members of the Pooh Bear Bunch, Deb Turner and Mary Miedema, were there.
Nowotarski was riding her Cervelo P2, a bike favored by triathletes because its design puts riders in a lower, more aerodynamic position. Nowotarski had been hesitant to buy the Cervelo, which starts at about $3,000 for a new model, from friend Lisa Casey because it felt less stable, but she conquered that, recalled Casey, who was also on the ride.
“That morning, we had talked about how good at riding it she was,” Casey recalled.
The riders, all equipped with headlights and taillights, turned onto Park Boulevard and started up the incline that marks the start of the bridge. Hodgson and Nowotarski were among five riders who had fallen back.
A sensor on Hodgson’s bike computer sounded, indicating a vehicle approaching from behind. He’d think later how rare that was at that hour.
Hodgson was a few bike lengths behind Nowotarski as they rolled onto the metal grating. He glanced at his computer and saw his speed had dropped to about 12 mph, then looked up and saw Nowotarski drifting to the left, toward the joint on the west side of the grating.
She rode into the groove, lost control and fell into the right lane, and was struck before Hodgson could hit his brakes. Turner was just ahead of Nowotarski and looked back in time to see her bike begin to wobble, then fall.
“When I saw her wobbling, I knew exactly what had happened,” Turner said.
According to the Sheriff’s Office, 41-year-old Lenon Ashford of Ohio was driving a 2015 Dodge Dart in the right lane when Nowotarski fell. Ashford was unable to avoid her, and the passenger side of the car struck her, deputies said.
Mike Schultz was riding in the passenger seat of a septic tanker truck traveling in the left lane when he saw the cyclists’ flashing red taillights up ahead. The truck was about a car length behind the Dodge. Both vehicles were traveling at or near the 40 mph speed limit, according to Schultz.
Schultz saw Nowotarski fall and the Dodge driver hit the brakes and swerve to the left. Schultz said his partner had to lock up the brakes to avoid crashing into the back of the Dodge.
“I dialed 911 and told them it was going to be a trauma alert,” recalled Schultz, a retired paramedic.
He went to Nowotarski and felt a pulse, then told her distressed friends. But Schultz knew Nowotarski’s injuries were likely fatal.
Ashford “had that devastated look in his eyes, like, ‘oh my God, I just killed someone,’ ” Schultz recalled.
Reached by phone, Ashford said he wasn’t ready to talk about the crash.
A Sheriff’s Office spokesperson said the crash report will likely take several weeks to complete. Deputies have said neither speed nor impairment appears to be a factor.
Florida law requires drivers to give 3 feet of space to cyclists when passing or driving alongside them, so Ashford wasn’t required to move from the right lane to the left as he approached the group. But Schultz said that if Ashford did consider moving over, he probably thought the tanker truck was too close behind to do so safely.
Had Nowotarski fallen a minute earlier or later, she would have gotten up with cuts and bruises, Schultz said.
“Everybody met at the same time,” he said, “and it was just tragic.”
Nowotarski’s friends say the county should figure how to make the joints less hazardous for cyclists. Zagami attended the county’s Bicycle Pedestrian Advisory Committee meeting days later and told the story of Nowotarski’s crash to bring the issue to the committee’s attention.
Fabrizio, the county spokesperson, said without a Sheriff’s Office report, the county couldn’t speculate on the cause of the crash. A spokesperson for Forward Pinellas, the county’s land use and transportation agency whose mission in part is to make the county’s roads safer for cyclists, referred the Times to Fabrizio.
Two days after the crash, the other three members of the Pooh Bear Bunch went to visit Nowotarski in the intensive care unit at Bayfront Health St. Petersburg. She hadn’t regained consciousness.
The friends noticed the cafeteria sold Nowotarski’s favorite ride snack, Smucker’s Peanut Butter and Jelly UnCrustables. They tucked some packets in their bras, just like Nowotarski did on rides, to smuggle them into the ICU and slid them under her covers.
Miedema recalls Nowotarski’s chest rising and falling, and her heart rate ticking up a couple of beats.
“I thought, maybe we’ll get a miracle,” Miedema said.
They whispered in their friend’s ear, stroked her cheek and held her hand. They told her how much they loved her, how they needed her to stick around for all the plans they had. They prayed.
She died the next day. Her lungs, liver and kidneys went to three patients, her daughters said.
“She saved three lives,” Alyssa Kirkpatrick said.
Along with a focus on making the bridge safer, Nowotarski’s friends hope her fall will bring awareness. They hope cyclists who ride the bridge will watch out for the joints, and that drivers approaching riders will move over when possible.
Turner planned to race the North Carolina half-Ironman with Nowotarski but instead attended her service that weekend. That Saturday, Turner did her own half-Ironman in Pinellas in her friend’s honor.
Before dawn, she and some friends gathered on Clearwater Beach. They fell silent for a moment in tribute, then began to swim.
Turner felt Nowotarski with her.
“She was chatting in my ear.”
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