We are devastated and infuriated by the news that our active member and leader Paula Sharaga was killed in a bicycle-truck accident yesterday afternoon in Boston. She was co-chair of our Boston Downwinders working group and cycled everywhere.

Paula had just left our office less than two hours before she was killed.  She was working on the mailing list for the Boston Downwinders.

Paula was green way before it was fashionable.  The Green New Deal did not come soon enough for her.  In partnership with all people of good will, let’s rededicate our work to her memory.

Cantabrigian, 69, is killed in Friday collision: Paula Sharaga was on bicycle in intersection

By Marc Levy  – Saturday, February 16, 2019.  Originally published in Cambridge Day

Cambridge resident Paula Sharaga, 69, died in a traffic crash that took place shortly before 1:45 p.m. Friday at Brookline Avenue and Park Drive in Boston.

Sharaga was riding a bicycle through the intersection, a complicated area near the Fenway Landmark Center and Riverway that is also fed by Boylston Street, when she was hit by a cement truck that had been stopped at a traffic light on Brookline Avenue, state police said. The truck moved at the green; Sharaga was hit by its front end.

“The sequence of events leading up the collision remains under investigation,” state police said in a Friday night press release.

Trooper Keith Deshler, who was working a road detail nearby, arrived at the scene of the crash to find two people performing CPR on Sharaga, state police said in the release. As the trooper called for an ambulance, another person approached, identified himself as a trauma physician and asked for a ventilation bag, which Deshler was able to provide from a medical kit. It was in use as Sharaga was taken to Brigham and Women’s Hospital and pronounced dead.

Sharaga was from Plainview, New York, according to a social media account, worked as a librarian and was known as an activist for social and environmental causes. For her last birthday, she urged friends and loved ones to donate to the Massachusetts Peace Action Education Fund, because “since the 1980s they have not wavered from their goals of ending war and promoting justice.” She lived on Columbia Street in The Port neighborhood with her husband. 

The driver of the cement truck, a 67-year-old Salem man, was taken to Beth Israel Hospital. No charges have been filed; an investigation will determine whether charges are warranted, state police said.