'Ghost bike' holds hope for cold case
Dinner will be waiting for you.
Those were the last words Kay Snopek heard from her husband before he pedaled his bicycle into the Boone County countryside the night of Aug. 8, 2007.
Mark Snopek, 53, was struck from behind and killed while riding on a rural county road. The driver of the vehicle has never been identified.
Twenty-four cyclists have been killed in collisions with motor vehicles on Iowa roads since 2011.
His wife gathered with friends this week to erect a memorial near the site of the fatal crash. These "ghost bikes" — riderless bicycles painted white and sometimes adorned with flowers and decorations — mark the scenes of cycling crashes. They have become more common along Iowa roadways.
Kay Snopek is hopeful the memorial will draw attention to the long cold case and possibly stir someone to step forward with information about the crash.
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“The pain lessens a little bit over time, but it’s scraping over that wound," she said of the memorial. “There’s somebody out there who knows something. Whether it’s the person who did it or not … I want that just to be finalized.”
The night of the crash
Mark Snopek set out on his regular 16-mile route around dusk on that warm summer night almost nine years ago. Kay Snopek drove through a light rain to her statistics final exams through Des Moines Area Community College.
“I was exhausted and I was one of the last students there,” she said.
Kay signed up for the math courses to challenge herself. Her husband provided the motivation she needed.
"He would always say, 'you need to go after this,'” Kay said.
She first met Mark Snopek in a high school chemistry class. Their first date was the junior prom. The couple attended different colleges and their relationship petered out for a few years, but they reconnected during Christmas of 1976. They would marry in 1979.
Mark Snopek became an environmental specialist with the Iowa Department of Transportation. Kay Snopek is a research associate at Pioneer Hi-Bred, who spends her days in greenhouses on the company's sprawling headquarters in Johnston.
They nurtured a thirst for the outdoors by hiking and cycling across rural Iowa.
“He pushed me," Kay, now 62, said. "I could tend to be more of a stay-at-home nester, doing things around the house. He’d say, 'come on, let’s go. You’ll thank me for this after.' And I would gripe but I always felt refreshed, maybe exhausted, but there was a rejuvenation from it.”
Kay was driving home — going over exam answers in her head — when she first spotted the emergency lights. They were coming from near the last leg of Mark’s cycling loop.
She felt the first pangs of anxiety but kept driving.
She arrived home to a dark house. Mark’s bicycle wasn’t hanging in its regular spot. She went to look for him, taking her husband's truck so she’d have a place to put his bicycle when she inevitably found him, she thought.
But police barricades blocked her path.
“Are you missing somebody?” Kay remembers one of the officers asking.
She was.
“They came back with more people and said, 'we’re so sorry.' And I just lost it,” she said.
Records from the time of the accident show police searched for a darker-colored car with front-end damage. They investigated six paths the vehicle could have taken from the scene, but each led nowhere.
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One year later, deputies got a tip from a used car lot. A customer brought in a vehicle with a broken windshield. The vehicle's owner was questioned and the car was sent to the DCI crime lab for testing. The windshield had broken when the car struck a deer.
Law enforcement ran out of leads years ago.
“At this point, there isn’t a lot of hope that we’re ever going to find that vehicle,” said Lt. Randy Bulver, district commander for Iowa State Patrol Post 15, who helped investigate the case.
Heartbreak turns to advocacy
Kay Snopek doesn’t cycle anymore, and she avoids the crash scene.
Instead, she threw herself into advocacy, serving on the board of the Iowa Bicycle Coalition, a group that advocates for bicyclists' rights.
During this year's legislative session, cycling advocates pushed to change the state's safety laws with a bill that would have required drivers to fully change lanes when they pass cyclists.
A Des Moines Register investigation found that many of the state's fatal vehicle vs. bicycle crashes, including the crash that killed Mark Snopek, were caused by drivers striking cyclists from behind. In many of those crashes, the driver faced no jail time and no more than a few hundred dollars in fines.
The bill would have enhanced the penalty for killing a cyclist to $1,000. But it died in the Republican-controlled House.
Kay Snopek is focused now on changing habits.
Even if the ghost bike memorial does not generate a lead in her husband's accident, she is hopeful that it might give drivers and cyclists pause to think.
“For me (the ghost bike) is a stark reminder of what transpired … It’s something for all passers-by to think about and to maybe alter their driving habits," she said. "And for the bicyclists who should make sure they’re following the laws of the road.
“Everybody has to pay attention, but the bottom line is this: a car is going to win every single time. And who wants that on their heart?”