An 11-year-old Ottawa boy was riding his bike home from school on Thursday when a driver struck him and sped off, leaving his mother to learn what happened from a police officer's phone call. Jason Mizer was taken to the hospital as a precaution and stayed home from school on Friday, still shaken by the crash near Ottawa Middle School.
His mother, Velara Schroff, said an officer told her that her son had been hit by a car, according to KMBC. She said Jason was more shaken up and terrified than injured, and he is expected to return to school on Monday, though Schroff plans to drive him to and from campus herself for now rather than let him walk or bike.
The hit-and-run marks the third publicized collision involving Ottawa students or school-zone pedestrians in the past ten months, and it has reignited a fight parents thought they had already partly won. Ottawa Middle School and Ottawa High School are near the crash sites, according to Ottawa USD 290.
A Petition That Wasn't Enough
Parent Alex Cain knows the danger of that stretch of Ash Street firsthand. Cain witnessed a serious crash at 15th and Ash last year, when a woman driving a car struck a boy who was later hospitalized, and started a petition drive afterward demanding the city act. That pressure resulted in a new crosswalk with flashing signs at 15th and Ash.
But Cain says the flashing lights have not solved the problem. Children are still being hit, Cain said, and the new crosswalk with flashing signs is not enough. Cain has since sent a note to Ottawa USD 290 Superintendent Dr. Ryan Cobbs pressing for further action, though crossing guards face obstacles to implementation that have so far kept them off Ash Street.
Thursday's crash was not an isolated flashpoint. Just a few weeks before Jason was hit, a mother and her daughter were struck near the schools in a separate incident that also killed the family's dog. Hoodline previously reported on that crash, in which a 45-year-old mother and her 11-year-old daughter suffered non-life-threatening injuries on September 1 after being hit by a car driven by a 16-year-old near West 11th and South Cypress streets, outside Ottawa High School.
A Pattern Stretching Back to Last Fall
The string of incidents goes back even further. In an Ottawa crash, a child was struck in a crosswalk and no citation was issued, as reported by WDAF-TV. That decision drew public criticism at the time, with parents questioning why no ticket was issued.
Cain said something must be done about the crashes, echoing frustration that has built with each new incident along the corridor. As of Friday, both the Ottawa Police Department and Ottawa schools were unavailable for comment on the latest crash, per KMBC's report.
Questions Raised by the Crash
The crash raises questions about what a fleeing driver is obligated to do.
Separately, Kansas Statutes Annotated § 8-1533 requires drivers to yield the right-of-way to pedestrians in marked or unmarked crosswalks when traffic signals are absent or inactive, and it bars drivers from passing a vehicle stopped at a crosswalk, per the same state statutes. Those rules are meant to govern exactly the kind of school-zone crossings at the center of Ottawa's dispute.
The stakes behind those laws are borne out in state research. A 12-year retrospective study published in 2025 analyzed 979 pedestrian crashes in Wichita, Kansas, from 2008 through 2019 and found that 97.5% of pedestrian-vehicle collisions resulted in injury, with 67.3% requiring emergency hospital transport, according to research published on PubMed Central. The same study found severe or fatal injuries occurred in 18.2% of the pedestrian crashes analyzed.
For now, families along South Ash Street are left weighing what they see on their own sidewalks each morning. Jason is set to return to Ottawa Middle School on Monday, and his mother says she'll be the one driving him there.
