About Portland: A Mother Shares Her Pain and Asks for Help

“I didn’t tell her that I loved her.”

Those words ring through the chamber of the Portland City Council spoken by a mother whose gentle voice only seems to magnify her pain. Fawn Lengvenis is speaking of her daughter, Fallon Smart, who she lost last month to a speeding driver.

“I lost my daughter, my best friend,” she says, not looking up from the paper that she is reading from.

It was the afternoon of August 19th when Smart was struck and killed as she was crossing Hawthorne Boulevard. The car was driven by 20-year-old Abdulrahman Noorah who now faces manslaughter charges.

Lengvenis grew up in Portland, not far from Hawthorne Boulevard. She frequented the street as a kid with her father, going to Powell’s books and other shops - a tradition that she carried on with her daughter.

Smart was getting ready to enter Franklin High School as a freshman. Mother and daughter were trying to spend time together before school started. They were living in the Foster-Powell area - “We never thought we’d own a house,” says Lengvenis, “but we were drawn to the neighborhood” - but they still liked to visit Hawthrone.

The day that Fallon died, they headed there.

“We were spending time together on Hawthorne as we had so many times before,” she tells the council. We had tea, went to Whole Bowl, Powell’s just as I had done with my father. She loved it there.”

After parking, they were waiting at an intersection, Fallon looked up to her mother.

“Before we crossed she asked, ‘where’s the crosswalk,” Dawn tells the city commissioners. “I told her every intersection is a legal crosswalk, a statement that will haunt me forever.”

It was the 15-year-old repeating a question her mother had asked her so many times.

From the time her kids were old enough to appreciate the lesson, Dawn tried to teach her about the importance of looking both ways, of being aware of her surroundings.

“Portland has been my home, where my memories were formed,” she says. “From ages one to nine, I made her hold my hand as we crossed the street.”

That ended when her daughter was 10 and one day shot her mother a look.

“I knew she was ready to cross without me.”

The following year, Fallon started riding her bike around the neighborhood - something that came with new lessons.

“Always stop at stop signs,” she would tell her daughter. “Don't expect the cars to see you.”

At 15, Fallon was ready to take her driver’s permit test.

Lengvenis told her daughter to make eye contact with the driver because “even if they stop, you don’t know if they’re stopping for you.”

The night before Fallon passed her test, her dad asked her “where do pedestrians cross?

“She responded at a crosswalk.

“And in turn my husband asked where is the legal crosswalk?

“Fallon responded every crosswalk is a legal crosswalk.”

Dawn says that her daughter was going to meet some of her friends but “surprisingly she wanted me to go with her to the bubble tea restaurant so we could just sit together.”

Mother left daughter at the bubble tea restaurant so she could socialize with her friends.

“I didn’t say goodbye because I didn’t want to embarrass her,” Dawn says, wiping tears from her eyes.

“I didn’t tell her that I loved her.”

After the crash, Lengvenis says that she blamed herself and it is only as time has passed that she is beginning to accept that “I did everything I could to keep her safe. I taught her everything I knew about pedestrian, cyclist and motorist safety and it still wasn’t enough to keep her alive.”

Lengvenis tells the council that “I’m only a mother who needs your help.

“Something larger has to be done so that children aren’t harmed and that other mothers have a chance to say, ‘I love you.’”