Magnus White was 17 years old. He could’ve graduated high school a year early, if he took just one class last summer. He decided not to, because he wanted to stick with his friends for another year.
Magnus will never graduate high school.
That’s because, on July 29th of last year, he was struck by a car and killed while riding his bike along Diagonal Highway 119 in Boulder County.
Magnus was on the USA Cycling National Team, and earned a spot on the Mountain Bike World Championships team shortly before he was killed.
KGNU’s Jackie Sedley spoke with Magnus’s parents, Jill and Michael, earlier this week. They told Sedley that Magnus’s love for biking knew no bounds.
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Magnus Greta Kerkhoff
“The bike was an extension of him. Racing was the icing for him. It wasn’t what he was there for. He loved pedalling, he loved riding. Just as a kid that loved to ride his bike. He went from training wheels to no training wheels in, like, 20 minutes,” Jill and Michael explained.
The two parents have been living in grief for over a year now. That grief has taken many forms – they’ve been brought to their knees in the home that Magnus once brought joy and light into, they’ve connected with others who have had their loved ones stolen from them by drivers on the road — and they’ve started a nonprofit called The White Line to advocate for road safety and try to prevent what happened to Magnus from happening again.
“When we [announced] the foundation, we had dozens and dozens of people reach out to us that had lost their loved ones,” said Michael. “I wouldn’t say, I don’t say lost, losing loves. I think we have to reframe that. Their loved ones lives were taken, was stolen. We did not lose Magnus. He was stolen from us. His life and his future was stolen from him.”
This Sunday, August 11th, The White Line will host the Ride for Magnus: Ride For Your Life, a 13.5-mile memorial bike ride in honor of the 17-year-old. The ride will start at 10 a.m. at Farrand Field on CU Boulder’s campus. The route goes north to Jay Road, east to westbound Diagonal Highway 119, and slightly beyond the crash site before turning around and taking the same route back to CU Boulder.
“None of what we do is going to change the outcome for Magnus, but it can change the outcome for other people, which is what we want,” said Jill.
Once cyclists return to CU, there will be a rally with speakers including Governor Jared Polis. The non-profit will introduce local, statewide, and national legislative efforts focusing on reforming penalties for drivers who cause injury or death to other road users, and forcing drivers to be more responsible behind the wheel.
“Grief belongs to somebody, no matter who it is. And if we’re going through this much pain, other people are going through the pain. And if what we can do using the power of Magnus’s story to change things, we will do it, “said Michael. “We’ve lost everything. And so, we will not be shy about what we say or who we say it to because things have got to move faster before more people end up like us.”
You can find a comprehensive list of Jill and Michael’s legislative efforts and demands at The White Line’s website, under the “Our Work” tab.
Transcript:
Jackie Sedley: Magnus White was 17 years old. He could have graduated high school early if he just took one class last summer. He decided not to because he wanted to stick with his friends for another year. But now, Magnus will never graduate high school.
That’s because on July 29th of last year, he was struck by a driver who was later found guilty to have fallen asleep behind the wheel and was killed while riding his bike along Diagonal Highway 119 in Boulder County.
Magnus was on the USA Cycling National Team and earned a spot on the Mountain Bike World Championships team shortly before he was killed.
I spoke with Magnus’ parents, Jill and Michael, earlier this week. They told me his love for biking was endless.
Michael White: The bike was an extension of him. Racing was the icing for him, it wasn’t what he was there for. He loved pedaling, he loved riding
Jill White: Just as a kid that loved to ride his bike. He went from training wheels to no training wheels in like 20 minutes.
Michael White: Yeah. And then within 2 hours, he was on dirt. He wanted to go right on dirt.
Jill White: So, from there, he just continued to get better and better and learn more skills.
Sedley: Jill and Michael have been living in grief for over a year now. That grief has taken many forms. They’ve been brought to their knees in the home that Magnus once brought joy and light into.
They’ve connected with others who have had their loved ones stolen from them by drivers on the road. And they’ve started a non profit called The White Line to advocate for road safety and try to prevent what happened to Magnus from happening to anyone else. This Sunday, the White Line will host the Ride for Magnus, Ride for Your Life, a 13.5 mile memorial bike ride in honor of the 17 year old. The ride will start at 10 a. m. at Farrand Field on CU Boulder’s campus. The route goes north to J Road, east to westbound Diagonal Highway 119, and slightly beyond the crash site where Magnus was killed. Then, cyclists will be directed to turn around, And take the same route back to CU Boulder.
Once cyclists return to CU, there will be a rally. The non-profit will introduce local, statewide, and national legislative efforts there, focusing on reforming penalties for drivers who cause injury or death to other road users. And forcing drivers to be more responsible behind the wheel. Here’s my conversation with Jill and Michael.
You’ll hear about who Magnus was, and about the importance of destigmatizing grief.
Sedley: So, first, tell me about, about your son. Who was Magnus, and, and what was he like?
Jill White: Well, Magnus was a lot of people’s best friend. After he was killed, we had a number of his friends reach out to let us know he was his best friend.
Michael White: At least 12.
Jill White: Yeah, It was very touching and surprising. I mean, I knew that his friends loved him, but I didn’t know to what degree they really did and they’ve just continued to love him. So he was the kid that loved to ride his bike, he rode his bike as soon as he can walk. And about like two, when he got his first Strider, he never got off the bike. He just loved it. And, um, he also loved adventure. He loved skiing and taking his car, his Subaru on lots of adventures.
Michael White: We called it the Subaru ATV because it’s gone places that Subaru should not go.
Jill White: But yeah, and he’s just a kid that loved to have fun and be goofy. Like he would go to Target with his friends just for something to do at night, you know, in the evenings. And they would just try on a bunch of clothes and goofy glasses. And he had these, like, he was so proud of his like baby glasses or girl.
Michael White: His Disney princess glasses, little tiny glasses.
Jill White: Yeah, he just loved just to be goofy.
Michael White: And he was extremely smart. You know, he had a 4.2 GPA and, you know, he’s one of the, one of those kids that just brought people in. And, you know, he made strangers, friends.
Jill White: Yeah. Like he would talk to anyone at the race. Um, his coach was telling us the other day that at bike races, people would just, kids, adults would just come up to him as he was warming up or after he’d finish and Magnus always like spent time talking to them and we had adults reach out reach out to us after.
Michael White: Yeah, he was at a race. I got a message from someone, a UCI race, which is the world level race. Cause there happened to be a race near where he was stationed and he had been a fan of Magnus since Magnus won a national title, uh, the year before. And he saw that Magnus was there and he went to go watch the race and he saw Magnus warming up on a trainer by himself. And he talked to Magnus for like 20 or 30 minutes. And, you know, at the end he told me, You know, Maddox didn’t have to talk to me, and he spent his time talking to me, and not every kid does that, only the special ones do. So to hear that a random You know, U. S. soldier stationed somewhere in the world that talked to him and told us those little stories that we didn’t, we didn’t know, you know, it’s, it’s really a special date to hear those, hear those.
Jill White: I think he touched a lot of people in his short life.
Sedley: And it sounds like you received a lot of outreach from folks, like you said, that Magnus really, really touched. Were you aware that he had that sort of impact on people or was he, was he pretty humble about that?
Michael White: He was very humble about it. We knew, I mean, we knew he had a lot of friends. We knew he had the ability to just kind of be friends with anybody, you know, but we didn’t know to the degree that he touched so many people. Cause we just saw him for our son here. Right. You know, we get frustrated with him, like any parent would with their teen kid. And to hear all those stories is bittersweet, obviously.
Jill White: Like he would go for a long ride and sit on the chair or the couch for about 20, 30 minutes, like cooling down. And he’d be on his phone. And as a parent, you’re like, “Oh, get off your phone.”
Michael White: “Get off your phone.”
Jill White: Later to learn he was, he was really connecting with people all over the world that he’d met along the way in his races. I didn’t know he had a good friend in the UK that was actually at the world championships that year.
Michael White: He won a world championship. And he had a message inside his shoe about Magnus and he won the track world championship, uh, that year for Great Britain. Um, you know, so all that’s bit really bittersweet, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s amazing to hear that about your son. It’s really hard to still know that he’s gone.
Sedley: Obviously, there’s so many multifaceted parts, and that’s clear in the work that you’ve started to do through this non profit. Part of it, so much of it, is the unimaginable grieving of the unprecedented nature of losing a child. It feels unnatural, I would imagine. And then there’s also the piece of it bringing awareness to the lack of, of safety or awareness that others have when it comes to sharing the roads and when it comes to having this, this trust in one another to be safe and to make educated decisions. So I would also love to hear a little bit about the nonprofit that you started, The White Line, and the kind of initiatives that you’ve been advocating for through that nonprofit that you maybe hadn’t considered before your life became so impacted by road safety.
Michael White: We probably knew a few months after that there’d be a foundation, didn’t know what it would stand for. But it really started about us just, um, opening our grief up to the world. We realized no one really thinks about this until it happens to them. America is very grief-phobic. Nobody really talks about it.
Most bereavement periods are very, very short. A few days for people, maybe two weeks. And so I was six weeks or so in just crying on the floor and you walked in on me and, and asked,
Jill White: Has anyone ever seen this before, to see a dad just taken to his knees on the ground, just crying?
Michael White: And I, myself, I work in the advertising and marketing world. So I work with filmmakers and about a month after I called some filmmaker friends and said, let’s just start filming, start documenting our grief. And they actually said they were waiting for my call. Um, they always want to actually make a film about Magnus. When he was alive. You know, obviously in doing it this, this way is like nothing, no way we remanded it.
And then it kind of came, um, we started the foundation. We released a trailer for Magnus documentary. That film crew is going to be, they’ve been following us ever since that early on. They’re going to follow us throughout our criminal trial. Um, and that’ll probably be It, I imagine. But when we released the first trailer for Magnus’s film: lives worth remembering, And announced the foundation, we had dozens and dozens of people reach out to us that had lost their loved ones.
I wouldn’t say, I don’t say lost, losing a loved one. I think we have to reframe that their loved ones’ lives were stolen. We did not lose Magnus. He was stolen from us. His life and his future was stolen from him. And I knew this early on, too, because Magus’ story was so large and so huge, you know, there’s been, in the first couple weeks, there was over 2,000 news articles written about him worldwide.
Since then, more than 1,300 have still been written about him, so the world is paying attention to his story, something about his story touched people deeply. We said to ourselves, other, other people’s stories deserve to be told too, not just Magnus’s. And so within those, all those dozens of people reached out to us, you know, we, we answered most of them actually, I think.
And, um, there was a husband and wife, they were hit from behind by a big truck with a piece of wood, lumber sticking out the side, and they both died almost instantly. And so, a friend of them contacted us, we contacted them, and connected us with the family. And we just started telling their story because their stories deserve to be told.
Jill White: And raise awareness that these aren’t singular occurrences.
Michael White: Yeah. And so that’s for all series and each one is an episode. So, um, we’re hoping what the purposes filmed are is to bring awareness to these cases. So people can see the human side of loss, right? We don’t think this has ever been done before this way. And he actually put humans to this terrible way of dying. And maybe people will drive a little more safely.
Jill White: So see, they see a person behind that’s riding the bike instead of an cyclist unknown unnamed cyclist.
Michael White: Yeah. And so the other part, the second initiative that we are very passionate about is increasing penalties. Um, and we have to start on the state level on that.
Jill White: Increasing penalties for those who careless and reckless drive resulting in death.
Michael White: Our case took four and a half months before charges were filed against the driver that killed Magnus. And they were determined to be felony reckless driving. And there’s a difference between careless and reckless. But too often, most often actually, people that kill another person, take a life, child, adult, it doesn’t matter, they just get charged with careless driving.
And the penalty for careless driving is more than likely just a fine in community service. So the penalties are adequate enough to deter people from driving irresponsibly. And so we want those penalties raised to be serious enough that people are actually thinking about like, “Oh, I can actually spend some real prison time, if I kill somebody, strike and kill somebody.” Because right now it’s not, and too many people are being hit and killed.
The stats, cyclists and pedestrians count for 20 percent of all road deaths in the U. S., you know, and 1,100 cyclists were killed last year in the U. S. I think it’s something like 47, 000 injured, so that’s almost 1,000 a week.
Any one of those injuries could be a death. I mean, a quarter second difference on Magus, the end of a three hour and 15 minute ride. A quarter second, he would be alive. That’s how close all those injuries are to death. The third initiative is we are absolutely behind infrastructure changes, you know, but those take decades.
The road Magus was killed on, the start to finish from when that project was conceptualized to when the construction will end will be over 16 years for a bike lane. That is way too long, right? So what can we do in the meantime? The quick fix infrastructure changes. Um, they did it right after Magnus was killed that we had to go to a press conference with Governor Polis and Senator Hickenlooper, head of CDOT, head of RTD, because they put, they did an emergency order to put rumble strips down the whole stretch on both sides because of Magnus.
It took them two days to do that. Why wasn’t that done before? The Department of Transportation has identified that as a Tier 1 hotspot. Tier 1 hotspot means lots of vehicle traffic, lots of bicycle traffic.
Jill White: Where Magnus was killed.
Michael White: Magnus was less than a foot from the grass edge. So he was all the way over where he needed to be. On a straight road on a Saturday. He wasn’t riding during a shower. You know, he knew the rules of the road. He knew to assume no one ever, assume no one ever saw you to ride defensively like that.
Jill White: Well he’s ridden all over the country and the world.
Michael White: Yeah. I mean, that year he was killed last year. I mean, it’s sad for us, because he was living his dream, but he was only home two months out of the eight months that year because he was in Europe training, erasing parts of the U. S. training, racing, you know, the drivers accused of falling asleep at the wheel. She’s witnessed swerving before. Would that have woken her up?
Something we’ll never know. We can’t, no matter how much we want to ask that. We can never like go back cause I won’t change a thing.
Jill White: None of what we do is going to change the outcome for Magnus, but it can change the outcome for other people, which is what we want.
Michael White: Yeah. And so, you know, this rally, this ride and this rally, we’re actually going to be making some legislative asks and clear call to actions at the rally at the local, state and national level.
So at the local level, the ask will be about fast tracking the US 36 bikeway from Boulder to Lyons. It cannot take 16 years. Like the diagonal, so we’re asking them to fast track it to be complete in less than five.
Jill White: Because it’s an extremely popular bike route.
Michael White: 90,000 cyclists a year. And it’s higher speed, half the width of the shoulder that Magnus was killed on.
Jill White: It’s just unsafe.
Michael White: Yeah, so that has to be fast tracked. State level, we are asking for more penalties. I am going down on August 16th to the capitol building. Governor Polis signed a measure in 2024 that the Transportation Committee has to look at careless driving penalties and civil penalties if they’re adequate enough when they result in death.
And so there’s actually a committee that has to take this up and listen to it. So myself, Bicycle Colorado, and D. A. Michael Dougherty are going down there to present and hopefully they demand they take this case. So that’s already on the books. This stuff’s already being planned for.
At the national level, the legislation that we are asking for is around automatic, automatic emergency braking in all vehicles, required for pedestrians, by 2029, but they left out bicyclists and motorcyclists.
Why? Cars are only going to get smarter. We know that the technology and with AI, all cars are going to get smarter. So within five years, all new vehicles should have AEB to protect cyclists and motorcyclists. And the stats show that that could bring down fatal crashes by 52%. So why wouldn’t that be?
So that’s the national ask that we are, we are doing. And there’ll be clear calls to actions that we have at the rally for people to do right then and there.
Jill White: Cause we want to make change. I mean, we don’t want to just talk about change. We want to make change.
Sedley: All of the work that you’ve mentioned is so people driven and, and emotion and human experience driven. Which, you don’t always hear a lot about, like you said, I agree this country is very grief phobic a lot of the time and it feels like a lot of responses to tragedies, like what happened to your son, are to try to push legislation or physical changes on roads and safety measures, which are important.
But, there is something to be said about the human consideration for life and the human ability to check in with yourself and think if you are able to drive, if you are able to be aware of your surroundings and the consequences of that. And so that is incredibly admirable that you’ve taken that approach, but I’d also imagine that that makes this more emotional.
I would, I would imagine it can make it more exhausting to be so tapped into that grief all of the time, even if it is healthy and even if there is catharsis in it. I guess I’m curious how you’re both able to maintain this drive to keep doing this work and also acknowledge the gap in your life and, and the loss of, of your son and to hold space for both.
Because it doesn’t sound like either of you are turning toward this work as a deflection from your grief. It sounds like you’re, you’re, you’re implementing your grief to fuel this work.
Michael White: You know, I think the world would totally respect us if we retreated into our grief. And a lot of times we just do. I mean, I took six months off work. You took about five, five and a half months. And even then it was slow going back. I mean, it is, it is absolute hell. Grief is hell. When people say time heals, it doesn’t, especially when it’s your child. And especially when your child was, killed by somebody else, time does not heal and memories don’t bring smiles.
The pain is immense. So yeah, we have to face not only our grief.
Jill White: Other people’s grief.
Michael White: So many messages.
Jill White: Of shared grief and shared loss and it, it is hard, it is complex and it’s definitely makes you question a little bit, like, why are you? Why are we exposing ourselves to this and why are we continuing to move into it?
Magnus is important to us and we’re still his parents and we’ll advocate for him as long as we live.
Michael White: We want to be proud of us doing, um, grief belongs to somebody no matter who it is. And if we’re going through this much pain, other people are going through the pain.
Um, and if what we can do using the power of Magnus’ story to change things.
Jill White: And people that are going through similar, they may not have as many resources or community. So if we can kind of advocate for them or feel like there’s some justice or to their situations and stories, I think that helps me also.
Michael White: Um, we’ve lost everything. And so, uh, we will not be shy about what we say or who we say it to because things have got to move faster before more people end up like us.
Sedley: Do you have other children or was Magnus your only child?
Michael White: Magnus has a younger brother. He’s 13. And so he’s just now really starting to process the loss. Um, because the brains really aren’t developed enough to understand what the loss is. So now he’s starting, as he matures and grows, he’s starting to see what the impact of that loss is. And he sees us in pain every day.
Jill White: Yeah. You know, we put him in, he was seeing, you know, seeing a grief therapist. And how are your parents? “They cry a lot.” “They’re really sad, they cry a lot, my dad cries a lot,” so he sees the impact on us. I give him a lot of credit, been very good about the time and the effort we’re still, we continue to put into Magnus, and he’s been really gracious about it.
Michael White: What you’re seeing is real, honest, authentic emotion, and that’s really all it is, or it’s just gonna fight for Magnus. You know, and that’s what this moving forward will always be.
Sedley: To hear more about the legislative actions Magnus’ parents and advocates are taking, and to register for the ride this upcoming Sunday, you can visit their website, www.thewhiteline.org.
