A student-athlete is considering pressing charges after she fell off her bike following a collision with earth sciences professor emeritus Amos Nur’s car at around 8:20 a.m. on Saturday. The collision occurred on Campus Drive at a crosswalk near Maples Pavilion.
Though both Nur and the student indicated that the collision was an accident, they gave conflicting accounts of how it occurred. An investigation of the incident by the California Highway Patrol (CHP) is underway.
The student, who has asked to remain anonymous as she considers legal action, told The Daily that Nur drove his 2018 Volvo into the side of her bike, leaving her with a broken wrist, back pain and “many bruises.”
She added that while Nur did not seem to see her crossing the street, “it is 50/50 on who to blame” for the accident. The student noted that she did not stop at the crosswalk but that she “did glance at [Nur’s] car before crossing.”
“While I was crossing the second intersection and on the crosswalk a car in the right corner of my eye sped up and impacted the right side of my bike,” the student wrote in a statement to The Daily. “The speed of the car launched me off my bike and I landed on the street.”
However, Nur wrote in an email to The Daily that he “did not run into the student.” According to CHP Officer Arturo Montiel, the student “apparently” rode her bike into the left front tire of the Volvo.
The student wrote that she believes Nur “assumed [she] would stop” at the stop signs marking the entrance of the crosswalk.
When asked if he felt he was to blame for the collision, Nur wrote, “The basic fact is that the biker ran into the side of my car.”
The student wrote that she does not remember whether or not Nur stopped at the intersection, though Nur wrote in his email to The Daily that he had stopped at a sign “some 45 feet away from the crosswalk.” Montiel also said Nur’s car stopped at the intersection before the incident.
Accounts of what happened after the collision differ as well. It is unclear what was said between Nur and the student after the professor exited his car to follow up on the accident. Nur reported that he asked the student whether she wanted him to call police or an ambulance but that the student declined his offers and walked her bike to the sidewalk, prompting him to leave.
“Using our cellphones we recorded our mutual Stanford information,” Nur wrote. “I left only after [the student] walked away.”
However, the student told The Daily that immediately after she took a picture of and returned Nur’s Stanford ID, “he said ‘hope you are okay’ and walked away, hopped back into his car, and left.”
The student then sat on the sidewalk until the Peer Health Educator (PHE) from her dorm drove by and stopped to help, she wrote. A police officer “happened to pull up to a nearby stop sign” about “a minute later,” she added.
“[The officer] asked if I needed an ambulance,” the student wrote. “I said I was slightly hurt and as soon as I mentioned anything about any type of injury he called an ambulance right away.”
While waiting for the ambulance to arrive, the student called her team coach, who drove the student to the Stanford Hospital emergency room after the ambulance arrived and was deemed unnecessary.
Nur told The Daily that he has spoken with police about the incident and has given them his driver information and car insurance. His car has been inspected, and he showed the inspectors the scrape “caused by the bike” on the driver’s side of the car, he wrote.
The student-athlete wrote that she is “questioning whether to press charges” in light of her injuries, which may put her athletic training on pause and cause challenges for the team.
“I was very fortunate to have not received a head injury as a result of the accident,” she wrote. “I wish I had taken five seconds to put protective gear on my head before getting into a dangerous/life threatening accident.”
“I wish bikers would obey traffic rules,” Nur wrote.
Contact Holden Foreman at hs4man21 ‘at’ stanford.edu and Nandini Naidu at nnaidu ‘at’ stanford.edu.