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player ready...Alex Blacio wasn’t scheduled to work Monday afternoon, but when a shift opened up at the indoor trampoline park where he’d recently been hired, he grabbed it. The 16-year-old was saving every paycheck to buy his mom a new house someday.
But the rising senior at Lake View High School never made it back to Albany Park that evening.
“He was hit by a moving truck,” his sister, Andrea Blacio, said Wednesday through tears. “He was nearly home.”
The teenager was riding a Lime scooter northbound on the 4100 block of North Western Avenue when he collided with a semi truck around 3:30 p.m., Chicago police said. Alex Blacio was taken to Advocate Illinois Masonic Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
He’s at least the third teenager to die this year in a crash while riding an electric scooter in Chicago, after 17-year-old Astrid Alexandra Carrillo Noguera and 15-year-old Violet Harris were killed in separate South Side accidents this spring. Blacio’s death comes as Chicago reports record-breaking use of its shared electric scooters, a surge that’s left health officials increasingly concerned about the injuries and deaths following close behind.
“We’ve seen a huge rise in serious injuries from these vehicles,” said Dr. Marion Henry, a pediatric surgeon at UChicago Medicine Comer Children’s Hospital. “It’s just as common, if not more common, than regular motor vehicle crashes in the emergency room this summer.”
Nationwide, emergency department visits and severe injuries from electric scooter crashes are climbing, with children accounting for roughly half of all incidents, according to multiple studies. Researchers at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center found earlier this year that boys younger than 18 accounted for about 70% of pediatric e-scooter injuries recorded between 2020 and 2024.
That’s consistent with what Henry has seen in Chicago, a city where riders logged a record 13 million trips on shared bikes and scooters last year, the highest annual total on record. Henry sees patients with e-scooter and e-bike injuries almost every day, a stark change from five years ago, when she rarely saw such cases.
Alex’s sister said their parents picked him up when he was out when they could, but trusted that the teenager would get home safely on his own. Her brother always used bike lanes when they were available, she said. But the stretch of Western Avenue where he was killed didn’t have one.
“They don’t make it very safe for them,” Andrea Blacio, 25, said. “He was always really safe, really cautious. It could have happened to anybody.”
Blacio’s family gathered at the scene Wednesday morning, placing framed photographs, candles, flowers and balloons at the corner of Western and Belle Plaine avenues. They held a vigil Tuesday night and plan to return at 7 p.m. each night for the next week. Dozens of people attended the first gathering, many of them strangers who shared stories about Blacio’s kindness.
“Everybody that showed out has been able to say something different,” said Andrea Blacio. “It gives (my parents) some peace knowing that their son was really loved and knowing that he did serve his purpose here.”
The family has started a GoFundMe to help with medical and funeral costs. At Lake View High School, Alex Blacio played volleyball, loved math and planned to study accounting in college. His family said he had a habit of putting other people first, and if a friend came to him with a problem, he’d ask his parents for advice before reporting back.
Before buying his girlfriend a birthday or anniversary gift, Blacio would call her parents to make sure he’d chosen something she’d like.
“He always remembered the little things about me that no one really cares about,” his girlfriend, 16-year-old Aleksandra Nedic-Estrada, said. “He just wanted what was best for everyone.”
It was only his second day on the job. His sister said he took the job to earn money for gifts for his mother. His cousin Diana Mizhquiri said his dream was to one day buy his mom a house.
“The majority of teenagers nowadays want to work because they want to buy themselves something,” said Mizhquiri, of Northlake. “Not him.”
Michael Manrique, a medical assistant at a nearby clinic, said he was among the first to stop on Monday afternoon after the collision. He spotted the teenager lying face down in the street, pulled over, called 911 and got out to help.
Manrique said Blacio still had a pulse and his eyes were open, but he wasn’t breathing. A 911 dispatcher instructed him to roll the boy onto his back, but after seeing the extent of the injuries, Manrique decided it was safer not to move him.
“The young man still had a pulse when I left,” he said. “I was optimistic that everything was going to work out.”
Henry, the pediatric surgeon, said the severity of electric scooter crashes is caused by high speeds, the exposed position of standing upright and low rates of helmet use. Because the devices weigh more than 60 pounds, they can be difficult to control.
Resulting injuries from crashes can range from minor concussions to bleeding in the brain that leaves children and teenagers with long-term neurological complications, she said. In other crashes, the handlebars are driven back into riders’ abdomens, causing severe damage to the liver, spleen and pancreas.
“The spectrum of these injuries is concerning,” said Dr. George Chiampas, an emergency medicine physician at Northwestern Medicine. “We’re seeing young individuals that are coming in with life-changing injuries that frankly can all be avoided and are avoidable.”
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Chiampas said he frequently treats patients who crash their e-scooters and are run over by vehicles after they’re thrown into the street. When a patient survives, recovery can mean days in the intensive care unit before months of rehabilitation.
Responding to a surge in electric bicycles and scooters, Illinois lawmakers passed legislation earlier this year to create a statewide regulatory framework for e-bikes and e-scooters. The bill received bipartisan support in both the House and Senate and now awaits Gov. JB Pritzker’s signature. Initiated by Illinois Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias’ office, the legislation would replace the current patchwork of local ordinances with uniform statewide standards.
Riders of e-bikes and e-scooters capable of traveling faster than 28 mph would be required to have a driver’s license, title, registration and insurance. The legislation would also prohibit those vehicles from traveling faster than 28 mph on roads, bike paths and sidewalks and require riders to be at least 16 years old.
When Dave Simmons, executive director of Ride Illinois, heard about Blacio’s crash, he pulled up a satellite view of North Western Avenue. His bicycle advocacy organization helped draft the legislation, and he’s experienced in assessing roadways for safety.
What he found, he said, was a busy arterial with little infrastructure for bicyclists or scooter riders. Although he would advise riders to choose streets with protected bike lanes whenever possible, he acknowledged that Western Avenue was the most direct route home for the teenager.
“It’s a reminder to be vigilant, to be careful, and to do as much as you can to follow the rules of the road,” Simmons said. “But people can do everything right, and still, at times, bad, bad things happen.”