Dad of girl killed by truck in Andover suffers his own close call

The first thought Eric Olson had after getting hit by a truck while cycling in Andover, Massachusetts, last week was of his late 5-year-old daughter, Sidney.

Olson was riding his bike down Woburn Street when a Ford F150 hit his back tire and sent him into a driveway across the street. He said he sprained his wrists and suffered contusions, but is expected to fully recover. The crash comes over a year after his daughter was killed while riding her scooter in the crosswalk at the intersection of Main and Elm Streets on May 9, 2023.

“Everything just came flooding back at that moment,” Olson told NBC10 Boston Tuesday. “When I was laying there, one of the things that I was thinking of was, how did I get out of this and Sid didn’t? It’s just a very unfair reality.”

Olson and his wife co-founded the Sidney Mae Olson Rainbow Fund to raise awareness about safer streets and push for change at the local, state and federal level. Streets should be designed not just to move cars faster, according to Olson, but to keep cyclists and pedestrians safe, too.

“There’s three things we focus on as an organization; safe streets, safe vehicles and active kids,” Olson said.

Approximately 6,000 pedestrians and 850 bicyclists die in car crashes every year, according to the Federal Highway Administration. Olson has been working with Massachusetts Congressman Seth Moulton on legislation like the Pedestrian Protection Act to change that.

“There are cities and towns that are starting to think about this in a more forward-thinking way, but for too long in America car has just been kind and everyone else has had to fall in line,” Moulton said. “You don’t want the tragedy that’s affected the Olson family to happen to your family and it very well could. They did everything right and Sindey’s gone.”

The pair said people like Sidney, 4-year-old Gracie Gancheva, who was killed by a truck in the Seaport, and the Gaudreau brothers, who died while cycling in New Jersey, are more than just a statistic.

“These are real humans that are getting hit, killed,” Olson said. “Unfortunately it takes stories like this to raise awareness of the problem because we are so conditioned to think that this is normal, that our transportation system is designed to protect us when it’s not.”