The family of a 36-year-old Google executive who was struck and killed while biking seven months pregnant in Los Angeles plans to sue the city, alleging its removal of bike lanes contributed to her death.
Regan Cole-Graham was riding with her toddler son near their home in the Playa del Rey neighborhood when an elderly driver crashed into them at the intersection of Pershing Drive and Manchester Avenue in February. Cole-Graham died. Her daughter Ophelia, delivered prematurely after the crash, died shortly after birth. The toddler suffered minor injuries. Cole-Graham's husband Matt Graham and another child, also present, were not hurt.
Now the family's attorney, Brian Breiter, is preparing a wrongful death lawsuit against the City of Los Angeles. His core allegation: the city stripped bike lanes from Pershing Drive before the crash, leaving cyclists exposed on a road that once offered them a buffer from traffic. The driver, whose name has not been released, has not been charged with any crime.
Breiter told KTLA that the absence of bike lanes was not incidental, it was the decisive factor.
"That protection, that area of safety was taken away, and we believe that was a critical factor."
The lawsuit has not yet been filed. The city has not publicly responded to the family's allegations or to questions about when and why the bike lanes on Pershing Drive were removed. Those details, the timeline of the lane removal, who ordered it, and what safety analysis preceded it, remain unanswered.
That silence matters. If the city did remove a designated cycling lane from a road used by families with children, and a pregnant mother died on that same stretch months later, the question is not whether the city feels bad. The question is whether city officials weighed the safety trade-off at all before they made the change, and whether anyone will be held accountable for the result.
Cole-Graham had worked for Google in Los Angeles since 2019. Her LinkedIn profile lists roles as Consumer Marketing Lead and later Brand Partnerships Lead. She orchestrated a multi-million dollar partnership with Live Nation, among other deals. She was 36.
She was also, by every account her husband has given, the center of her family. Matt Graham previously described her as an "amazing wife" and "the world's best mother." The couple had two sons and were expecting Ophelia, their first daughter.
Graham spoke to KTLA about the weight of raising his children without her.
"I feel like she was the better parent of the two of us and now I have to try and somehow make up for the void that is so impossible to fill."
He described his children's bond with their mother in plain terms.
"They were addicted to their mother in the best way possible because she was always there for them, always wanted to play and be outside with them."
The crash happened roughly two miles from the family's home, the kind of short, familiar ride a parent takes with a toddler on a weekend morning.
In an Instagram post, Matt Graham wrote that he decided to share his story publicly for the first time because he wanted the world to "remember how amazing she was in every way, and how ridiculously excited she was to be a 'girl mom' for the first time nearly 8-months pregnant with Ophelia."
He also made clear that the lawsuit is not just about his family's loss. It is about what happens next, to other families, on other roads, in a city where policy decisions can quietly strip away protections that cyclists depend on.
"Whatever it takes to better the city for other families, because I don't want any other family to ever have to deal with what we have had to deal with."
A GoFundMe campaign set up for the family has raised more than $302,000.
The elderly driver who struck Cole-Graham and her son has not been charged. Law enforcement's current posture on the case, whether an investigation remains open, whether charges are under consideration, is not clear from available reporting. The driver's name has not been made public.
The City of Los Angeles, for its part, has offered no public comment on the bike lane removal, on the planned lawsuit, or on Cole-Graham's death. That is a choice. A pregnant woman and her newborn daughter are dead. The road where they died once had bike lanes. The city took them away. And so far, no one at City Hall has explained why, or whether they even considered what might happen next.
Los Angeles officials love to talk about building a safer, greener, more bike-friendly city. When a young mother and her baby pay the price for a policy that moved in the opposite direction, the silence from those same officials tells you everything about how seriously they take their own promises.
