After almost three years of legal battles, the city of Spokane Valley struck a deal: the council agreed on Tuesday night to pay over $3 million to settle a lawsuit brought by Sakeleanna Adame, whose 18-year-old son Bryce was killed in a 2022 car crash.
By any measure, it’s a massive sum — it’s nearly double the amount the city of Spokane once paid to a grieving family after the death of Otto Zehm, a mentally disabled janitor who was beaten so badly the cop swinging the ironwood baton was sent to prison.
Yet for Adame, it’s little solace.
“It’s never going to feel like a win for me,” Adame said. “It was never about the money. There's no amount of money in the world that can make me feel better about this.”
In a press release, the city of Spokane Valley emphasized that they did not admit to any of the blame for the accident, but that liability standards in Washington state put the city at so much risk that it made sense to settle.
“Bryce Adame’s death was a terrible tragedy, and the City extends its deepest condolences to his family, friends and loved ones,” the statement said.
And yet Spokane Valley didn’t offer one concession she had been hoping for: a memorial at the intersection where her son was killed.
“I wanted the memorial,” Adame said. “That's what I really wanted.”
Adame argues that Spokane Valley’s approach during the lawsuit backfired. As attorneys on both sides started debating what her son’s life was worth — judging what his lifetime earnings would have been by school records and the people he hung out with — Adame said it made her want to extract as high a price as possible.
“I was going to fight them to the moon!” she told RANGE. “Because that's my son, and it's not right. You can't put a value on somebody's life. Nobody."
Ultimately, the agreed-upon settlement totaled $3.2 million, with $3 million to be paid to Adame, $100,000 to Bryce’s brother and $100,000 in an annuity that would be paid out to a younger family member as she grows older.
Yet when Adame filed the lawsuit, she said she had two goals, neither of them financial: make the intersection where Bryce died safer and create a memorial there for her son.
Adame knows that Bryce’s friend — the young man whose hands were on the steering wheel and foot was on the gas pedal — bears much of the blame for the accident that killed her son. He was speeding. He was high. She knows he will carry the burden of Bryce’s death for the rest of his life.
But maybe, she thinks, if the street itself had been different — if the stop sign were more visible, if the road had been smoother and better maintained — the car Bryce was in wouldn’t have hit the infamous “Bowdish bump” at such speeds; it wouldn’t have bottomed out and been sent into an uncontrollable spin; it wouldn’t have launched 100 yards, tumbled over landscape boulders, or crashed into a pine tree. She wouldn’t have had to see her son die as she held his hand in the hospital that night.
RANGE’s review of social media posts, neighbor interviews and public records showed that long before Adame was killed, the area around Bowdish Road and 16th Avenue was infamous for collisions, including several instances where speeding cars lost control and ended up in the front yards of the neighbors. In a deposition, the city’s traffic engineer program manager said no other intersection they’d examined had a higher per-vehicle accident rate.
Today, after a lengthy redesign and funding process, the intersection has been completely renovated, complete with a very visible roundabout.
But her second goal was simple: she was hoping for a memorial for her son. While she’s thinking about using part of the settlement money to, say, help fund a scholarship for Central Valley High School students who share some of her son’s traits, she deeply wants to have a memorial at the site of his death.
It could be as simple as a plaque that reads “In loving memory of Bryce Prince Adame. 09.23.2003 - 01.23.2022,” paired with a street sign that says “drive with caution.”
During one of the mediation sessions, she said, one of Spokane Valley’s attorneys had mentioned the possibility of such a memorial, something that wouldn’t cost more than a few hundred dollars. But when the final settlement was offered, the memorial wasn’t part of the deal.
She said she didn’t want to trade away part of the settlement in exchange for a memorial, either, because that felt like she was discounting her son’s value. And she didn’t want to simply use the money to buy a piece of property somewhere else to put up her own memorial — she wanted it to be at the site of his death.
In an email to RANGE, Spokane Valley’s communications manager Jill Smith said there is an existing process where a Valley resident can apply to pay to install a community sign, which includes buying a $600 permit and going through a 45-day review process.
“I don't understand why they couldn't have told me this,” Adame said to RANGE.
Among Spokane Valley leadership, there is at least some openness to the idea of putting up an official city-sponsored memorial. Though Spokane Valley Council Member Al Merkel remains skeptical of the changes recently made to improve safety at the intersection, he said that he was very much in favor of a memorial.
“I really do think we should do it,” Merkel said. “She had a terrible and profound loss. We should recognize that. What else is a city for?”
He said he’s even asked for information about the process of creating such a memorial. Merkel, however, couldn’t speak for the rest of the council, a body he has often intensely clashed with. The final paperwork on the settlement has yet to be completed, and some other Spokane Valley officials are cautious about weighing in until then.
Adame said the lack of a promised memorial almost caused her to reject the settlement offer.
"I was like: I can't sign this,” Adame said. “I don't want to go to trial, but I'll go to trial.”
But ultimately, her surviving son convinced her that she could allow herself to settle.
“My son Logahn came up to me, and he said, 'Mom, it's okay.'" Adame shared. "He said, 'I'm so proud of you.’ He said, 'My brother Bryce would be so proud of you, Mom. You fought so hard and you did so good.' He said, 'You can rest now. You can be done.'"
Logahn hugged her, and tears came streaming down — the tears that came from feeling a heavy weight carried for a long, long time get lifted.
“Is it enough?” she asked her son. “They said his life isn't worth anything. Is it enough?”
“It's enough, Mom,” she remembers her son telling her. “It's enough."
