Barrington High School junior Will Silveria had been biking back from the beach when he saw a car hit his friend Toby Rein. The accident occurred while Toby was in a crosswalk near Joyce Street on County Road.

Will said he immediately ran across the street to help, despite not knowing who it was at the time. 

Once he recognized it was Toby, his Boy Scout mentor and former rowing captain, Will said “it made it a lot harder and a lot more personal.” 

He remembers feeling a resolve that he “had to help him and save him.”

“I’ve known Toby since fourth or fifth grade,” Will said. “He’s always been somebody you can look up to, always the ideal scout, a very good person, very ambitious...one of those people everyone knows and likes.”

A sophomore at Arizona State University and Barrington High School graduate, Toby had been walking home on Friday, July 19 when a car struck him on his left side at about 6 p.m. The car “hit him and he went flying, he flipped around in the air, head over heels,” said Will.

A boy scout, Will knew exactly how to respond. He stabilized Toby's neck and back, used someone's jacket to slow the bleeding from his head, and got another person to call 911. As fate would have it, Toby was Will’s mentor in Boy Scouts and taught him how to respond in an emergency situation such as this.

Toby sustained lacerations on his head, left leg, and left arm but suffered no concussions nor broken bones.

According to Will, it took about five minutes for emergency personnel to arrive. He said he was treating Toby by himself for two to three minutes before an off duty EMT pulled over and began administering first aid.

As he was being treated, Toby asked a bystander to get help from the Sullivan residence on Joyce Street. Deb and Pat Sullivan are the parents of Toby's childhood best friend and founders of East Bay Rowing.

Having lived on Joyce Street for 17 years, Deb Sullivan says this crosswalk has always been treacherous. When you are trying to cross "no one sees you," she said, "especially on the opposite side."

Toby's accident brings attention to the concerns that have surrounded the pedestrian strip among residents in the area. Ms. Sullivan described how when her now college-aged children attended the preschool down the street, she and her neighbors would walk together to drop the kids off. Sometimes it would be so hard to cross the street that one parent had to take his daughter's lunch box and throw it into the road to stop traffic, she said.

Will said "people go through one crosswalk and don't want to slow down for another one." The crosswalk Will is referring to is the one near Police Cove Park. That pedestrian strip has received a few more safety measures, having three signs - one in-road crosswalk sign and two more standing on both sides of the road. 

Homeowners would like to see the same level of signage on the pedestrian strip near Joyce Street to prevent accidents like Toby’s from happening again.