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Bike & Build leader killed
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Bike & Build volunteer Paige Hicks
Staff report
YOUNGSTOWN
Paige Hicks, one of four leaders of Bike & Build, which helped build a Habitat for Humanity house here in June, has been killed by a semitrailer’s wide load on a South Dakota highway.
According to The Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune, Hicks, 21, of Chesterfield, Mo., died Tuesday on Highway 18 on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in south-central South Dakota as she checked her cell-phone messages along the shoulder. She was stopped with one other cyclist at the top of a hill on the two-lane road when she was hit by a combine atop the semi, which extended into the shoulder, the South Dakota Highway Patrol told the Star Tribune.
The other cyclist was not injured.
The patrol said the truck driver didn’t see Hicks until it was too late for him to avoid hitting her and likely would not be charged. He was complying with the law regarding wide loads, the trooper said.
Hicks and the group were on a 3,863-mile trek from Providence, R.I,, to Seattle, Wash., to raise funds for and lend hands to affordable-housing groups and other charities. Bike & Build’s website says Hicks had covered more than 2,200 miles before the accident and had raised more than $4,000.
Bike & Build participants are 18 to 25 and cycle during summer months. This group began its journey June 15 and arrived here June 27. Hicks said they were logging about 70 miles a day and aimed to reach Seattle by Aug. 18.
She said the cyclists aren’t permitted on interstate highways, so they travel secondary roads.
Hicks, a senior biology major at Brown University in Providence, was on her second Bike & Build trip.