An attorney and mother was one of the first people to die on a dangerous Sacramento road in 2024
Johanna Kate Johnston, a persistently positive attorney who became an angler so she could take her son fishing, was killed by a driver while riding her bicycle to work Jan. 17. She was 55.
Johnston was riding from her home in Curtis Park to her job at the California Department of Social Services downtown when she was struck by a driver at the intersection of 21st and X streets. The north- and southbound bike lanes on 21st Street remain unprotected between Freeport Boulevard and W Street — cyclists are separated from traffic only by paint. X Street has no bike lanes and is a wide, one-way road, which experts have found encourages higher speeds.
Officials have identified both streets as part of Sacramento’s “high-injury network.”
Municipalities such as Hoboken have demonstrated that traffic fatalities and serious injuries are almost always preventable: The New Jersey city recently announced that it has gone seven years without a traffic death. Like Hoboken, Sacramento pledged to eliminate these deaths and injuries, but has so far failed to achieve that aim.
As part of a broader effort to protect cyclists, pedestrians and drivers, the city has made safety-enhancing improvements on 21st Street north of the crash that killed Johnston. The bike lane becomes protected by parked cars for most of the 14 one-way blocks between W and I streets.
South of W, however, cyclists are fully exposed to cars, and several collisions have occurred. UC Berkeley’s Transportation Injury Mapping System shows that in 2014, 2015, 2017 and 2018, cars struck cyclists within the three blocks of 21st Street just south of the intersection where Johnston was killed.
Between 2012 and the end of 2022, there were two fatal crashes on X Street within a two-block radius of the collision that killed Johnston. In 2019, a driver struck and killed a pedestrian at 23rd and X streets. In 2013, another pedestrian died after being struck by a car at 19th and X streets.
Gabby Miller, a spokeswoman for Sacramento’s Department of Public Works, did not directly answer when asked whether the city had specific plans on X or 21st streets. She said that staff were planning “and have been seeking funding for” improvements “on appropriate streets.” The city has struggled to find money to pay for such improvements.
“Safety of human life,” Miller said, “is our highest priority.”
In January 2017, leaders in Sacramento announced a “Vision Zero” plan to eliminate all traffic fatalities and serious injuries. The city has made some strides, including recent improvements across nearly 70 blocks in the central city. But Sacramento has not yet met its goal: According to the Transportation Injury Mapping System, between the year of the California capital’s Vision Zero announcement and the end of 2022, more than 160 pedestrians and cyclists died in Sacramento car crashes.
Johnston died of her injuries in the hospital Jan. 17. Two days later, on Jan. 19, Sacramento hit the seven-year anniversary of its unfulfilled promise to stop such deaths.
Loved riding her bike
Johnston — who was known to her family and friends as Kate — loved riding her bike, which she habitually used to commute. “Ever since I have known Kate, if she could bike somewhere instead of drive, she would,” said Teresa Zepeda, Johnston’s wife. “Distances most people would think you need to drive would be nothing to her.”
When Johnston pedaled around Sacramento, her friend and colleague Rachel Raymond said, “she just liked the feeling of connection to the world around her — being out in the open, being able to see people, to hear the sounds. ...She was into her senses, and being really grounded in everything around her.”
Zepeda and Raymond both said that Johnston was fastidious about bike safety — she wore bright neon clothes, a reflective vest, a helmet with a light, and she used flashing bike lights. Knowing how exposed she would be to cars on many Sacramento streets, she carefully planned all her routes to minimize danger.
“It didn’t matter,” Zepeda said. “Now I see people on their bikes and think, as careful as you are, it is not enough.”
A California love story
Kate Johnston was born July 29, 1968. She grew up in Santa Barbara County, in the valley that nestles between the Santa Ynez and San Rafael Mountains. Her parents, Jeanne and Stewart, raised her alongside two sisters, Taran and Anne. Johnston didn’t stray far for college — she went just a little southeast, to UC Santa Barbara.
After graduation, Johnston enrolled in Mills College to earn a master’s in English literature. In 1994, she returned from the Oakland campus to spend a summer in Santa Barbara, where she slyly began to court Zepeda.
The Army/Navy surplus store on State Street where Zepeda worked became Johnston’s haunt that August. “I didn’t think anything of it — the same people were in and out of the store all the time,” Zepeda said. “I should have realized she wasn’t our usual clientele: young, pretty, feminine — not the usual surplus store customer.”
Zepeda was helping her one day when Johnston asked her to get coffee after work. Zepeda already had a date that night, she said, “and I knew immediately I would cancel it.”
The two quickly fell in love. Johnston returned to Mills a few weeks later, and the pair dated long distance for the school year.
“We knew we were right for each other from the beginning,” Zepeda said. “When she graduated that year, she moved in with me in Santa Barbara, and that was that.”
Johnston taught writing at Santa Barbara City College and later at UC Santa Barbara. Eventually, she started going to law school, taking night classes. In 2002, she graduated, and the couple decided to settle in Sacramento.
They moved into a 1920s Tudor in Curtis Park. They chose the neighborhood because it was close to downtown, and they knew they would want to bike or take transit to work. Johnston, driven by her belief that everyone is entitled to a vigorous defense, started her own practice as a criminal defense attorney.
‘She had a gift’
Zepeda and Johnston had always pictured their lives with a child. Johnston got pregnant, and their son was born in the summer of 2006.
“It was truly,” Zepeda said, “the best thing that ever happened to us.” They read to him every night before bed until he was middle-school aged. Johnston learned to fish so she could take their son on fishing trips.
The attorney eventually left criminal defense and took a job at the California Department of Social Services. There, she spent about a decade of her career working on enforcement cases — she would hold offending facilities and individuals to account for sometimes disturbing violations, including abuse.
Raymond, who worked with Johnston and is now assistant chief counsel in the agency’s policy branch, said that her friend’s idea of justice was focused on repair, not retribution. She could be confrontational when she needed to be, but she always sought to resolve conflict with the greater good for everyone in mind. Counter-intuitively, Raymond said, even opposing counsel appreciated her.
Johnston could be a little eccentric, too: She took all the furniture out of her office and invited visitors to join her on one of the many large pillows she placed on the floor.
Around the time that Johnston started working at the state agency, she married Zepeda in South Lake Tahoe in a small courthouse ceremony in front of their son. “No big affair,” Zepeda said, “just the three of us.”
Zepeda asked that their son’s name be withheld. Now 17, he has chosen to grieve privately.
After the death of her partner of nearly 30 years, Zepeda initially declined an interview request, too. “I wouldn’t be able to get through it,” she said. Ultimately, she answered questions by email. It was cathartic, she said, to remember Johnston this way.
But it was also strange. Before Johnston was fatally struck on a road the city knows is dangerous, she was a writer. “She was always working on one writing project or another,” Zepeda said. “She had a gift.”
And so usually when Zepeda had to write something important, Johnston would read it over for her.
Johanna Kate Johnston
Attorney, writer, mother and Curtis Park resident.
Age: 55
Died: Jan. 17, 2024. She was struck by a car at 21st and X streets as she rode her bike to work.
Survived by: Wife Teresa Zepeda and their son; sisters Taran and Anne; and parents Jeanne and Stewart.
