Seattle, WA : Sher Kung was struck and killed Friday morning by a truck while riding her bicycle on August 29th 2014

Bystanders and family members continued to place flowers and white-painted “ghost bikes” over Labor Day weekend at the site where 31-year-old Seattle attorney Sher Kung was struck and killed Friday morning by a truck while riding her bicycle in downtown Seattle. Seattle police reported that the truck was making a left turn onto University Street from Second Avenue — a notoriously dangerous bike corridor that is set for construction of a pilot separated bike lane – when it struck and killed Kung. The Perkins Coie website said Kung was an associate with the firm’s litigation group, focusing on intellectual property litigation — including patent cases relating to mobile, software and gaming technologies. She was active in the American Civil Liberties Union and the GLBT Bar Association and had taken part in prominent cases protecting gay rights. In 2010, Sher was a member of the ACLU trial team that successfully challenged the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy as applied to a former Air Force Officer in Witt v. Department of the Air Force et al, according to the Perkins Coie website. “The outpouring of grief has been remarkable,” wrote the Seattle Bike Blog about the accident. “It comes from those who watched it happen, those who knew her and those who bike downtown every day and know that it could have easily been them instead of Kung.” Second Avenue has been criticized in the past as a poor location for a bike lane because vehicles frequently turn left on the one-way street and may not see bicyclists coming up behind them. That appears to be what happened in this case. The new bike lanes, which could begin going in as soon as Sept. 8, according to the Seattle Bike Blog, would put either a row of parked cars or dividers between vehicles and cyclists. They will also include traffic lights for left-turning traffic and cyclists in an attempt to prevent accidents like this one from happening. Source : Perkins Coie attorney killed in Friday bicycle-truck crash helped overturn Don't Ask Don't Tell