A 33-year-old mental health worker died after being struck by a hit-and-run driver near Alameda Street in Downtown Los Angeles, and his family says the person responsible was caught by police but has since been released on bail. Kenli Black was riding his motorcycle to help someone experiencing a mental health crisis when he was hit on July 12, according to his family.
Black worked for Brain Health USA, an organization that provides outpatient mental health care across Southern California, and he was actively en route to assist a client in crisis at the time of the crash, according to a GoFundMe campaign set up by his family. The driver who struck him left the scene, and Black suffered a severe head injury. He remained hospitalized for nearly six days before his mother, Lisa Mitchell, made the decision to withdraw his life support on July 18.
Mitchell told ABC7 that the driver should have stopped, checked on her son, and called 911. According to her account, police did catch the driver, but the suspect was later released on bail — a detail Mitchell says has left the family searching for answers as they push publicly for accountability. As ABC7 reports, Black's family does not live in Los Angeles and is now grappling with the loss from a distance while calling for justice.
A Life Remembered Through Art
Black was the only boy among seven sisters, and those close to him say he loved to draw pictures on cardboard — a hobby his family says now lives on through the artwork he left behind. Mitchell said she wants the driver who hit her son to serve time, a wish that underscores the gap her family feels between what happened and what has followed since the arrest.
The Los Angeles District Attorney's Office was contacted for comment, according to ABC7's reporting, though it remains unclear whether felony charges have been formally filed in the case. Under California Vehicle Code Section 20001, fleeing the scene of a crash that causes serious injury or death is a felony punishable by two, three, or four years in state prison and fines ranging from $1,000 to $10,000, according to Cefali. California law requires drivers involved in any injury collision to stop immediately and render reasonable aid, regardless of fault.
Why Bail Alone Doesn't Mean Freedom
The family's frustration over the driver's release points to a broader feature of how Los Angeles County handles these cases. Base bail for felony hit-and-run charges involving serious injury or death typically falls between $50,000 and $100,000, though a judge ultimately decides pre-trial release terms based on public safety risk and flight concerns, according to the Helfend Law Group. The county's 2023 pre-trial bail reforms applied to non-violent offenses, but serious felonies causing injury remain subject to monetary bail or magistrate review — meaning an arrest and a release on bail can both be true well before prosecutors make a formal charging decision.
The Los Angeles Police Department investigates fatal hit-and-run cases through specialized Traffic Divisions, with Central Traffic Division handling collisions across Downtown L.A. and coordinating with the District Attorney's office on felony filings, according to LAPD Online. The city also maintains a Hit-and-Run Reward Program Trust Fund offering up to $50,000 for information leading to an offender's identification, arrest, and conviction in fatal cases, a program the City Council created in 2015 to address the sheer volume of drivers who flee crash scenes.
A Corridor With a Deadly History
Alameda Street, a major commercial and freight artery bordering Downtown L.A. and the Arts District, has seen severe hit-and-run crashes before — including a February 2022 collision at Alameda and Palmetto Streets that killed a victim struck by a fleeing pickup truck driver, as reported by CBS Los Angeles. Downtown corridors like Alameda remain heavily represented on the Los Angeles Department of Transportation's High Injury Network, where 65 percent of all pedestrian and cyclist deaths and severe injuries occur on just 6 percent of the city's street miles, per an analysis from Steven M. Sweat.
Black's death also fits into a grim citywide pattern. Los Angeles recorded 290 total traffic fatalities in 2025, marking the third consecutive year that traffic deaths have exceeded homicides in the city, with pedestrians and other vulnerable road users representing more than half of all victims. When the city launched its mass hit-and-run alert system, LAPD data showed nearly half of all traffic collisions in Los Angeles involved a driver who fled, compared to an 11 percent national average — the department historically solves only about 20 percent of the roughly 20,000 hit-and-run incidents it logs each year, according to research compiled by CSUN.
Motorcyclists face particularly steep odds in these crashes. A 2025 analysis of collision data from the UC Berkeley Transportation Injury Mapping System found that while vehicle-versus-vehicle crashes caused 71 fatalities in the city, vulnerable road users like pedestrians, cyclists, and motorcyclists made up the vast majority of L.A.'s nearly 300 annual traffic deaths, since they lack the protective structure of an enclosed vehicle.
For now, Black's family continues to wait for word on formal charges and is calling on anyone with information to come forward. His mother has been clear about what she wants to see next: prison time for the person who left her son to die on Alameda Street rather than stopping to help.
