When their pet tortoise was killed early this month at the age of 40, the Georgii family of Grover Beach was crushed - especially the three children.

Ironically, Speedy was killed by a speeding car, run over just three doors from her Margarita Avenue home after escaping from the backyard, apparently when a gate was left open.

“You could tell (the car) was definitely going very fast, because if it was going slow, it would have just squished her,” said Tom Georgii. “Since it was going fast, the shell started skidding, then cracked.

“Also, because if she was standing up to cross the road, (the occupants) would have noticed her. ... If they had been doing 15 or 20 miles an hour, they would have seen her. And they probably would have stopped. They didn't stop.”

Georgii is afraid what happened to Speedy could happen to someone's pet or, even worse, a child or an adult along his winding, narrow street.

Since moving into his Margarita Avenue home in 1997, Georgii has seen many drivers race up and down the street.

Although most drive 35 to 40 in the 25 mph zone, he's seen a few blow past his house at what he estimates is 55 to 60 mph on a street that has blind curves and rises that block drivers' views.

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Georgii said he's tried several times to get the city to solve the speeding problem. So far, the steps taken by the city haven't worked.

But city officials say help may soon be on the way.

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After Georgii collected the desert tortoise's remains, the family placed her in a hand-carved wooden box lined with felt and gathered at the top of their property.

There, the children - 5-year-old Blake, 8-year-old Tanner and 12-year-old Zachary - read letters to Speedy about their experiences together during the five years she lived with them.

“That really jerked a tear from me,” Tom Georgii said. “I wasn't expecting that.”

They placed the letters in the box with Speedy, buried her under a concrete tortoise sculpture and decorated the grave with flowers.

Georgii said the ceremony helped the children deal with their grief, but that's small consolation for the loss of a pet that had become part of the family since he found her wandering down the middle of Railroad Street in Santa Maria in 2003.

Fearing the tortoise would be run over, Georgii stopped his truck and picked her up. He unsuccessfully tried to locate the owner and eventually wound up at Triple T Ranch, “A home for wayward turtles and tortoises” in Arroyo Grande.

There, he learned the tortoise was about 35 years old and female.

They registered Speedy with the California Department of Fish and Game, and she became part of the family. The kids took her to school for show-and-tell, and Zachary did a report on her in the fifth grade.

At the time, Georgii was teaching at Robert Bruce Elementary School in Santa Maria. When he taught units on animals, he would take her to class, where she would wander around the room as the children wrote essays.

She escaped twice before - once by pushing out a fence stake and once when the gate was left open - but was returned unharmed. The third time, she wasn't so lucky.

“I've got to take responsibility for her getting out,” Georgii said. “But, man, those things are tenacious.”

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Margarita Avenue at one time was a private, dead-end street, constructed narrower than city standards and without curbs, gutters and sidewalks to save costs when the homes along it were built in the 1980s, Georgii said.

The city allowed the substandard street provided a homeowners association would maintain it, he said. When that failed to happen, the city took it over and the barrier between Margarita and Charles Street was removed.

That turned it into a route from the Charles Street area to Highway 101, and the speeding began.

With a sidewalk blocked by mail boxes and overgrown trees on only one side and vehicles parked on both sides, pedestrians are forced to walk in the curving, undulating roadway, Georgii said.

“We've got people driving at unsafe speeds around blind curves and over a blind rise,” he said. “We've got them coming up a blind hill where they can't see a kid walking into the street.

“I've almost been hit a few times getting into my car,” he added, noting his children are not longer allowed to play in their front yard.

He said he addressed the City Council twice, and every resident on Margarita signed a request to solve the speeding problem five or six years ago, but nothing was done.

Once, after a driver went around him at about 45 mph as he was leaving for work, he went to the Police Department and talked to a former chief and other city officials.

As a result, the police conducted extra patrols and put a radar trailer on the street to warn drivers when they exceeded the speed limit, but the speeding has continued.

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However, the city hasn't forgotten the matter. In fact, following a series of meetings in March to set goals and priorities, the City Council made calming traffic on Margarita Avenue its No. 3 priority under the work program for streets.

“We've been struggling with this for a while,” Mayor John Shoals said last week. “The Traffic Committee looked at it with respect to putting in a stop sign or speed bumps, but they decided the street works fine the way it is.”

He said the committee rejected speed bumps partly because it didn't want to set a precedent that could end up applied throughout the city.

However, Shoals noted improving pedestrian safety is one of the Grover Beach's top goals, and he hopes a professional transportation planning firm like Omni-means can survey the street to come up with some options.

“There are other ways we can do some traffic calming,” he said. “We want to make sure we get this done before something bad happens.”

June 30, 2008