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By JASON LAUGHLIN
Courier-Post Staff
CHERRY HILL
Ashlee Lindsey was not supposed to ride her bicycle on Haddonfield-Berlin Road.
The busy county route was off-limits to the Cherry Hill 13- year-old. But her mother Vivian McEady-Lindsey said, "She was doing what she wanted to, as usual."
Ashlee told her mother she was going biking Tuesday afternoon. She didn't say, though, she was going to visit a boy she wasn't supposed to be seeing. Ashlee was too young for boyfriends, McEady-Lindsey said.
The girl was pedaling across the four-lane road when she was hit by a Mercury Mountaineer about 3:45 p.m. near Morris Drive, authorities said. She was taken to Cooper Hospital/University Medical Center in Camden, but died. The girl was not wearing a helmet.
The SUV's driver, a Westmont man, stopped, and no charges are expected to be filed against him, Cherry Hill Lt. Robert English said. Police would not release his name because he is not charged.
Ashlee, adopted at age 5, had survived so much. Her mother and father, Robert Lindsey Jr., said they were told that she was raised in an abusive home in Salem and abandoned by her mother when she was 2. Ashlee never saw her biological mother again. She spent the next three years of her childhood in the custody of the state.
The Lindseys remembered the day they met her at a Division
of Youth and Family Services picnic. An illness that riddled McEady-Lindsey's spinal column with tumors made it difficult for her to conceive, she said. But the couple wanted a sister for their daughter, Querida, now 15.
The child who would become their second daughter captivated them immediately. The little girl handed the Lindseys a balloon animal, McEady-Lindsey remembered.
"I thought she was so generous to offer us her doggy," she said. "I was just touched by her generosity."
They signed adoption papers for the girl a year later.
She loved to hug. She was a social butterfly. She made friends quickly in school and was always on the phone. And she was caring, and always willing to rub her mother's ailing back.
But her early years had left their scars. She lied. She stole. Often she took food and hid it beneath her mattress, a compulsion from her early childhood when food was apparently scarce, the family said.
She argued with her parents. She challenged household rules. And she craved affection, the Lindseys said.
"It was a long haul," said McEady-Lindsey, who is on disability.
But their efforts with the rebellious little girl were starting to show results, they said. The lying and stealing had stopped. She was doing well as a seventh-grader at Carusi Middle School.
"She was growing and developing, and I'm just sorry she couldn't grow further," said her father, who works for a social services agency in Philadelphia.
But she still had problems with obedience, they said. She wouldn't wear a bicycle helmet. And she insisted on biking on Haddonfield-Berlin Road.
Biking on that road, County Route 561, is risky, highway experts say. The road, which stretches east to west nearly across the county, has sidewalks but no shoulders in some places, including the area where Ashlee was hit. The speed limit is 40 mph there. Traffic signals slow down cars, but 561 is the busiest of the county roads, said highway department engineer Hank Karbach. And the road's stretch near Interstate 295, where Ashlee was hit, is 561's most congested stretch, he said.
"I wouldn't want to ride out there. I wouldn't want to let my kids ride out there," Karbach said.
The county is making an effort to put bike lanes on its roads, he said.
Often the onus is on the cyclists to be aware of what's around them, said John Madera, Regional Bicycle Programs Coordinator at the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission.
"There's a lack of knowledge on the part of bicyclists as to the proper use of the road," he said.
Karbach, who as a young Boy Scout used to hike the two- lane, rural Haddonfield-Berlin Road of the 1960s, believes part of the problem is the mind-set of the motorists.
"Everyone rushes," he said. "People don't leave themselves enough time to get where they need to go."
The Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia
215-BICYCLE
www.bicyclecoaliton.org
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