Peter Aleck says the force of the crash was so great, he thought his Hummer had been struck by another car.
Instead, he had actually struck a cyclist crossing against a red light on a Divvy bike.
The cyclist, 18-year-old Yader Castaneda, of southwest suburban Plano, was flung from his electric ride-share bike at Michigan Avenue and Randolph Street and died over an hour later, authorities said.
He was the first bicycle fatality in Chicago of 2025, according to the city’s transportation department.
Aleck, owner of Aleck Plumbing Inc. of Homewood, said he was driving to the gym in the predawn light of Memorial Day in the moments before the crash. He said he was the only car stopped at the light just before the intersection where the crash happened. He was going south on Michigan Avenue, approaching the top of Millennium Park.
“They must have thought there was no one coming. I must have been halfway through the intersection. I thought it was a car,” Aleck, 65, told the Sun-Times.
According to an initial police report, Castaneda rode through a red light west on Randolph Street with two other friends on bikes at 4:53 a.m.
That’s when he was struck by the left front end of a 2024 EV Hummer going south on Michigan Avenue, the report states. The report doesn’t say how fast the truck was traveling.
Aleck said he stopped and called 911. He then remembers one of Castaneda’s friends staying near the 18-year-old until paramedics arrived.
They took him to Northwestern Memorial Hospital, where authorities say he was pronounced dead over an hour later.
A sibling of the cyclist, reached by phone, declined to comment.
Officers reviewed police surveillance video of the intersection and confirmed Aleck drove through a green light, according to the report.
Aleck denied that he was driving while distracted, which a police report states, saying he was looking “straight ahead” before the crash. He also denies he was driving without insurance, which police say he was cited for.
Police took Aleck to Northwestern for a DUI test, according to the report. Police said the investigation was ongoing.
“It’s terrible. I feel really terrible about it,” Aleck, of southwest suburban Frankfort, said.
He said he dropped the truck off at a body shop, adding it’s not “driveable.”
The fatal crash happened on a city-designated route for cyclists to and from the lakefront.
Although Randolph has bike lanes, the intersection with Michigan Avenue can feel dangerous to cyclists and pedestrians who must cross its 10 lanes of traffic, said Christina Whitehouse, founder of safety advocate group Bike Lane Uprising.
“It’s not a comfortable route to get through as a bicyclist and as a pedestrian,” she said. “Why are drivers prioritized in that area when there’s so much foot traffic?”
This is the city’s first official bicycle fatality of the year, according to Chicago Department of Transportation spokeswoman Erica Schroeder.
Chicago logged five bicycle deaths last year, according to the news website Streetsblog Chicago. Ten cyclists died in 2023, 10 in 2022 and 11 in 2021, according to the Transportation Department.
The Divvy rideshare bike system historically has had lower crash rates than other types of bicycles, according to previous reporting. But the Divvy system has many more electric-assist bikes that move faster than human-powered bicycles.
Injuries reported at emergency rooms attributed to “micromobility devices” — such as e-scooters, electric bikes and hoverboards — have increased 21% each year since 2017, according to a Consumer Product Safety Commission report from October 2023.
Divvy, Chicago’s bike-share program that began in 2013, is owned by Lyft and operated by the city’s transportation department.
Neither Lyft nor the city’s transportation department immediately provided crash statistics related to Divvy bikes.