MLive.com: Bicycle-safety advocate dies

After struggling for decades to overcome a childhood brain injury, Lee Anne Barry discovered a passion bicycling cross-county to advocate safe riding — and died doing it. While she was biking Sunday afternoon in South Carolina’s Lancaster County, an SUV struck the 43-year-old Jackson native. She died several hours later in a Charlotte, N.C., hospital, the Charlotte Observer reported. The accident also killed bicyclist Thomas Hoskins, 49, of Columbia, S.C.

Barry was participating in her fourth trek across the United States, a journey that began in August in Seattle as a part of The B.I.G. Ride tour. Barry founded the nonprofit tour in 2001 to share her testimony, advocate helmet use and spread information about head injuries. B.I.G. stands for Brain Injuries Greatest.

“She was very passionate about it,” said Vida Myers of Leoni Township, the wife of Barry’s uncle, Clair Myers. “This was her thing.”

Late last month, Barry and her husband, Ben, made a stop in Jackson, where they spoke with fourth-graders at Northeast Elementary School about how helmets can save lives.

“Anything can happen if you hit a crack in the road and get thrown over,” Barry, a Northwest High School graduate, told the class. “You can get brain damage.”

When she was 5 years old, a car hit Barry on West Avenue, putting her in a coma for weeks, Clair Myers said. “She had to relearn to walk and talk,” he said. “I thought she’d never come out of it.”

But she did, going on to graduate with a degree in psychology from Grand Valley State University.

“She had a little trouble with one arm, a little trouble with her gait, but she never let it stop her,” Vida Myers said.

After college, Barry headed south, her uncle said. She moved to Charlotte in 1998 and met Ben Barry, an architect. They adopted a son, Christian, 15, about three years ago.

Ben Barry was to return to Jackson today or Friday. His wife always wanted to be buried in Jackson with her mother, Norma Genix, who died in a car wreck about 42 years ago.

A memorial service is planned for 10 a.m. Saturday at Charles J. Burden & Son Funeral Home, 1806 E. Michigan Ave.

Lee Anne Barry used her early struggle as inspiration. “Memories of life before my accident are the most precious to me, but the memory of spending my sixth birthday in a wheelchair still motivates me to be as physically active as possible,” she wrote in a testimony posted on The B.I.G. Ride Web site.

She wrote that she hoped her cross-country travels would move other brain-injury survivors to realize their lives can be meaningful.

“Her life was an inspiration to all she touched,” her husband wrote in an e-mail to bicyclists after her death. “Her passion to help those with brain injury and prevention, her faith, her beauty will be sorely missed and challenge all of us to live our lives worthy of her memory.”

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