The number of Americans who commute via bicycle jumped by 64 percent between 1990 and 2009, yet the laws that protect them have lagged behind. Some 726 cyclists were killed by cars last year. In Forefront this week, reporter Andrew Zaleski sets out to see what can be done to lower that number.

It was a clear and bright spring morning in central Mississippi. Jan Morgan and her cycling buddy Kim Richardson were riding along the edge of a two-lane highway, training for an upcoming triathlon in Florida. Both wore helmets. It was Sunday and traffic was slow on a rare flat stretch of State Highway 50. That’s when Richardson heard the rumble of an approaching car.

The initial impact sounded “like a gunshot,” Richardson recalls. Morgan, 57, had been hit from behind. Richardson saw her friend bounce into the air and come falling back down onto the hood of the car, which continued to speed ahead for several hundred feet before coming to a stop.

Local newspaper accounts said the vehicle had been traveling at 55 miles an hour, although no one will ever know exactly how fast the car was going when it hit Morgan.

Richardson remembers the driver, a local woman named Robbie Norton, getting out of her car with a cell phone pressed against her ear. She was telling the person on the other end that she needed a ride home. “‘You have to come get me, I’ve hit a woman,’” Richardson remembers Norton saying.

Moneaka Jones and her boyfriend, Jessie, had been driving directly behind Norton. They stopped when they saw the crash, and Jones placed the original 911 call. That’s when all mayhem broke loose.

“When we turned around,” Richardson says. “Her [Jones’s] boyfriend was screaming, ‘Oh my God, she’s run over her!’”

To the three of them, it appeared as if Norton was trying to move her car to the side of the road. But in the process, she drove over Morgan’s head, with her right front tire placed squarely on top. (Norton’s attorney says that she was in a state of shock.) They screamed at Norton to back the car up, which she did, but after getting out of the car a second time, she reentered the vehicle. “I was horrified that she was trying to drive it again,” Richardson says. “I was screaming at her through the passenger-side window, which was down. She was trying to put her keys in the ignition… I was trying to reach into the sedan to grab her keys.”

It was Jessie, Richardson says, who finally pulled Norton away from the car. An ambulance arrived soon after. Morgan was sped to the West Point location of the North Mississippi Medical Center about 20 minutes away, and then was flown by helicopter to the hospital in Tupelo, Miss.

The car’s impact had fractured the base of Morgan’s skull and caused bleeding in the temporal lobe of her brain. She had a cardiac contusion, which would require an intravenous line carrying doses of blood-pressure medication to be inserted in the right atrium of her heart. Her ribs, sternum, a vertebra, fibulas and fingers had also been fractured.

When the Mississippi Highway Patrol arrived, a trooper conducted interviews with Norton, Richardson and Jones. Norton was sent home without arrest.

After a week’s time, an official accident report was filed. Meanwhile, Morgan stayed in the intensive care unit for another month. For the first two weeks, the doctors weren’t positive she would survive. By the end of it all, medical expenses totaled more than $500,000.

“I was scared to death,” says her husband, David Morgan.

His fear would soon turn to anger when he realized that local police had no interest in pursuing charges against the woman who nearly killed his wife. After the State Highway Patrol’s investigation concluded that there were no grounds for felony charges, the district attorney also demurred from pressing charges.

“As far as the state of Mississippi goes, you could be an armadillo hit on the road, and the state treats you just the same as a… cyclist,” Morgan says.

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