Inside a Group of Vigilantes with One Goal: Painting Crosswalks to Protect Pedestrians

Three days after 9-year-old Nadir Gavarrete was struck and killed by a driver in an RV while crossing a Koreatown street, Los Angeles resident Bianca Cockrell knew her volunteer group had a mission.

“We’d been planning on painting a different intersection in another part of town,” she says. “But when I heard about that boy being hit, I said, ‘We have to get over there. We have to paint there.’ And everyone agreed.”

On Aug. 2, Cockrell and fellow volunteers from Crosswalk Collective LA — a group that secretly paints makeshift crosswalks on city streets — added white stripes to the intersection, including a message in tribute: “En Memoria De Nadir Gavarrete.”

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