The lawyer for the family of a comatose Johns Hopkins University student, critically injured while riding his bicycle last month in north Baltimore, said the family’s $10 million lawsuit against the driver whose car struck him is meant to send a strong message to motorists.

“I don’t think she’ll be (criminally) charged and I’m not sure she should be,” said Andrew G. Slutkin, the lawyer who filed the suit Monday against Jeanette Marie Walke in Baltimore City Circuit Court.

“I don’t think she intentionally did this, I think she made a mistake,” Slutkin said, referring to the 83-year-old Walke, whose car allegedly struck 20-year-old Nathan Krasnopoler on Feb. 26.

But Slutkin argued that judgments like the one Krasnopoler’s family is seeking against Walke are the only way to make Baltimore-area roads safer and prevent similar tragedies.

“The moral of the story is, we need to better educate motorists about the law and about co-existing on the roads with motorcyclists and pedestrians and bicyclists and everyone else,” he said, in a telephone interview. The suit alleges that Walke violated multiple traffic laws in the late Saturday morning collision.

Messages left for Walke today were not returned.

No charges have been filed against Walke. Police have not completed their investigation into the crash, according to Shonte Drake, deputy communications director for the Baltimore City State’s Attorney, who said that media reports that police met to discuss the case today with prosecutors  are “a misquote.”

Baltimore city police have backed away from earlier statements that the driver would not be charged and that the cyclist was at fault.

Until other accounts surface, though, the six-page complaint offers the most detailed scenario yet of what may have happened in the crash that has roiled the cycling community and set off a passionate — sometimes ugly – debate among motorists and cyclists about whose behavior most needs to be curbed.

A University Parkway U-turn?

According to the Krasnopoler family’s complaint, Nathan was riding his bike northbound on University that day and Walke was driving southbound on University when she “made a U-turn, and drove past Nathan as both Nathan and Defendant  were now traveling northbound on University Parkway approaching 39^th St.”

Walke turned right into the driveway of her apartment building, the Broadview, and cut off Krasnopoler’s right of way, the suit alleges. The suit also claims that Walke “failed to properly signal” before making the turn into the Broadview driveway.

The suit says Krasnopoler was unable to stop his bike and was thrown over Walke’s vehicle, which then ran over him, pinning him on his back underneath. Krasnpoler was severely burned because the driver left the car running when it was on top of him, the suit alleges.

His other injuries include eye damage, facial fractures, broken ribs and collarbone, two collapsed lungs and traumatic brain injury, the suits says. The Johns Hopkins engineering student has remained in a coma since the crash.

In the phone interview, Slutkin reiterated the suit’s claim that Walke broke several laws, including failure to yield the right of way in a bike lane.

“I mean, how much clearer could it be when there is a bike lane and there’s a law that just went into effect three months earlier that protects them?” Slutkin said.

(He may be referring to a new law that requires motorists to yield the right of way to cyclists when they are in a designated bike lane or to the so-called “three-foot law,” which says motorists overtaking bicycles “must pass safely at a distance of not less than 3 feet.”)

Slutkin’s firm, Silverman, Thompson, Slutkin & White, also handled the case of the family of another cyclist, John R. “Jack”  Yates, who was killed by a truck turning right off Maryland Avenue in 2009. “It echoes this case,” Slutkin said.

The defendants (Potts & Callahan Inc. and the driver of the truck) settled the Yates family’s civil lawsuit for an undisclosed sum.  In the Yates case, police also made statements early on that the driver was not at fault. “We found video and other evidence to prove that was not the case,” Slutkin said.

He said the firm has spoken with about a dozen people, “some were at the scene, some were there shortly thearefter,” and “people tell us  (Krasnopoler) wasn’t flying, he wasn’t doing anything unusual, he was in the bike lane going maybe 15 miles an hour. She had passed him right before and must have forgotten about it. She turned, cutting him off and causing him to go flying over the car.”

Slutkin said even though he knows some cyclists are reckless, most are not and that he finds some peoples’ hostility toward cyclists “especially in the Sun comments section . . . really annoying.”

“There are a lot of people with this terrible animosity toward cyclists,” Slutkin said. “And the police have their bias against cyclists too.”