LOS ANGELES — Kris Edwards waited at home with friends for his wife, Erika “Tilly” Edwards, to go out to dinner, but she never made it back to the house they had purchased only four days earlier. Around 9 p.m. on June 29, a hit-and-run driver killed Tilly as she walked to her car after a fundraiser performance in Hollywood.

“I’ve just got to figure out how to keep living. And the hard part with that is not knowing why,” Edwards said of his wife’s death.

Despite local, state, and federal safety campaigns, such as the global Vision Zero initiative to eliminate traffic fatalities, such deaths are up 20 percent in the U.S. from a decade ago, from 32,744 in 2014 to an estimated 39,345 in 2024, according to data from the Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administra

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