By Sito Negron
His name is Arturo Frias Moreno. I didn’t know that — I learned it from the news Thursday. I and many others call him Sunset Tury. People who know him better knew him as T-Bone.
Sito Negron
If you didn’t know him, you might have been a little wary of him, because he was rough around the edges. If you knew him, you knew he had a big heart, and loved his neighborhood down to the bone.
According to the news, he’s 57. He’ll always be 57, because he has no more years left. Tury, who grew up in Sunset Heights, was struck and killed by a car while walking Sunset Heights Wednesday.
According to news reports, six people have been killed in traffic collisions this year. The reports don’t break it down by type, but at least one other pedestrian has been killed in traffic this year – a child killed when he was struck by an ATV Tuesday.
According to a Dec. 26 report on KFOX, 61 people died in traffic last year. According to the City’s Vision Zero dashboard, “between 2016 and 2020, 124 pedestrians were killed in El Paso, which ranks the city as the 18th worst metro area for pedestrian fatalities in the United States.”
I couldn’t quickly find stats for pedestrians, but perhaps reducing it to numbers misses the point. El Paso isn’t the worst place for traffic deaths, or for pedestrian deaths caused by a vehicle running into them. But it’s by far not the best, either.
Pedestrians are usually blamed for the death. This is often because they did not cross at a designated crosswalk. I used the phrase “pedestrian deaths caused by a vehicle running into them” because that is accurate, regardless of the cause of the vehicle running into a person.
I don’t know what happened to Tury, but I do know that people often speed through Sunset. I do know that El Paso doesn’t have enough crosswalks, and that people don’t look out for pedestrians or bikes, and that El Paso once was built for people who drive, walked, took streetcars and trolleys, maybe biked, and now it is built almost exclusively for cars.
I have many questions about what happened. The facts will come out. I also have questions about what we collectively can do. Sunset Heights is next to I-10, and if the highway is expanded, we expect that during construction there will be even more people speeding through our neighborhood as traffic is detoured.
El Paso has great plans – Vision Zero, a global movement that seeks to get to zero traffic deaths, is one – but the political will isn’t there to implement it fully, or to challenge the status quo that sees the city sprawl ever further and become every more car-dependent. The political will isn’t there to properly fund Sun Metro, which must be creative to maintain its level of service and is undergoing a review of which lines it will maintain or improve or delete. That isn’t a choice the agency should have to make.
The Sunset Heights Neighborhood Improvement Association is part of a coalition of local organizations opposing I-10 expansion called the El Paso Streets Coalition. Whether it’s I-10 or East Montana, what is the alternative, one may ask?
There are actually alternatives, plural. One involves cars. Investing in safer street design – for example, narrower lanes and slower speed limits are two easy concepts, although not easy to implement because … we build for cars to go further and faster. That is less safe for both pedestrians and drivers.
The other is getting cars off the road by giving people alternatives – frequent, reliable mass transit that is coupled with sidewalks and other pedestrian and bicycle supporting infrastructure. El Paso is a bit of an under-the-radar bike mecca for recreational riders, but we also have a population of people who ride as transportation.
Too many places in El Paso don’t have sidewalks, let alone curb cuts to make the sidewalks accessible for everyone. I reported to 311 a dumpster blocking the sidewalk in the 700 block of North El Paso on Jan. 21. The last update is Jan. 28 and states it is still in progress. I can pass on the sidewalk, but a person in a wheelchair would be unable to pass, and they would be stranded on the bridge over I-10.
I’m guessing that in El Paso there are hundreds if not thousands of such minor obstructions that have a big impact if you’re the one who is stuck.
Sunset Heights is not unique in this regard. As a community, we lack the political will to make changes that make it safer for people to move around, not just more expedient for cars to move. We all need some Vision Zero. We all need to slow down.
I don’t know where Tury was headed or where he was coming from Wednesday afternoon. Maybe he was headed to Mundy Park, where he presided, where he gave nicknames to people, especially the basketball kids. He called my son Shooter, and when I saw him he’d ask,”Ay, how’s my man Shooter?”
On Saturday, residents will gather in Mundy to pray the rosary for Arturo Frias Moreno, a man with a name and a deep history. We will miss him, and hope he will still be watching over the park and the neighborhood.
Sito Negron is a resident of Sunset Heights and is Secretary of the Sunset Heights Neighborhood Improvement Association.
This <a target=”_blank” href=”https://elpasomatters.org/2026/02/07/opinion-sunset-heights-pedestrian-death-el-paso-vision-zero/”>article</a> first appeared on <a target=”_blank” href=”https://elpasomatters.org”>El Paso Matters</a> and is republished here under a <a target=”_blank” href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/”>Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src=”https://i0.wp.com/elpasomatters.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/cropped-epmatters-favicon2.png?resize=150%2C150&ssl=1″ style=”width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;”>
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