Wiseman, after she was hit by a van and ticketed for jaywalking. (Photo courtesy Zoe Wiseman)

On July 15, Zoe Nightingale Wiseman woke up in a bed in Washington Hospital Center, not knowing where she was or how she'd gotten there. She could only see out of one eye and felt pain throughout her entire body. In a panic, she tore out her intravenous tubes and tried to crawl out of bed. The nurses had to restrain her.

“Calm down,” they said. “You’ve been in an accident.”

The nurses did their best to fill her in. They said she’d apparently been hit by a car while Rollerblading. That made some sense to Wiseman. A big fan of the old-school transit method, Wiseman Rollerblades all over town, and always from her apartment in Columbia Heights to her job as a waiter and bartender at Eighteenth Street Lounge near Dupont Circle. But Wiseman, 26, didn’t know when or where the accident occurred.

She soon found a clue, in the form of a traffic ticket issued by the Metropolitan Police Department. The nurses told Wiseman it had arrived with her in the ambulance. She had been cited — while unconscious, as far as she knows — for crossing against a “don’t walk” signal, or jaywalking. The fine was $25.

Wiseman had three skull fractures, a broken cheek, three cracked ribs, and a broken pelvis. She was on morphine but conscious enough to be infuriated. “The police never followed up with me,” she says via Skype, bedridden and holding a bag of frozen peas to her face days after the accident. “They just left the ticket.”

Wiseman was shocked that she could be found responsible for an accident even though she was never able to argue her case. According to D.C. police spokesman Lt. Nicholas Breul, a victim like Wiseman should always be given that opportunity.

“That generally is not the way we would handle that,” he says, noting that he doesn’t know all the circumstances of the incident. “Generally, when people are injured, you are to go to the hospital, interview that person, and also … check on [the victim’s] condition. Simply leaving a notice of infraction on a hospital gurney with the patient is not proper service.”

But in fact, the ticketing of an unconscious pedestrian or cyclist has been known to happen in Washington. In a town where at least one pedestrian or cyclist is struck by a vehicle every day on average, that sometimes means wrapping up an investigation before consulting the party who was hit. Earlier this year, an employee for the Daily Caller who had been struck by a car downtown on M Street NW was ticketed while sedated at the emergency room.

As Wiseman awaited reconstructive surgery on her face, her mother requested the police report in the days following the accident. According to the report, a van making a right on red off Connecticut Avenue onto R Street NW hit Wiseman in the crosswalk. Wiseman had collided with the van’s passenger side, “causing damage to its right rear fender.”

Wiseman couldn’t recall any of it but says the report didn’t jibe with her routine. A regular Rollerblader for 15 years, she insists she always Rollerblades in the street. “I’m never in the sidewalk,” she says. “It’s literally not possible” to skate anywhere but in the road, considering all the foot traffic on that strip.

The driver, Kemal Saglam, who works for a nearby hotel, says he never saw Wiseman.

“When I heard the noise I thought someone hit my car,” he says. “I did not see her…. I don’t know if she was coming from the sidewalk.”

Saglam, who was shaken up by the incident, says he tried to follow up with police to find out Wiseman’s condition but never heard back. Two other witnesses listed in the police report did not return calls for comment. The officer listed in the police report, Michael Diemer, could not be reached.

Much worse than the $25 fine, says D.C. personal injury lawyer Frederick Brynn, is the fact that the citation and report can carry weight in court. “If she’s seeking to bring any civil claim because of the accident,” he says of Wiseman, “that ticket to some degree can be used against her. It doesn’t help her.”

Incidents of hospitalized pedestrians being ticketed goes back at least to the 1980’s in the District. Art Siebens, a Cleveland Park resident who’s active in upper Northwest pedestrian safety issues, says he was cited for jaywalking while at the Georgetown University Hospital emergency room after being hit by a Saab on Connecticut Avenue in 1987. Siebens, who blacked out and was hauled away with a broken pelvis in an ambulance, had tried to make it across the six lanes at Rodman Street, where pedestrians commonly cross even though there’s no signal. The officer arrived about 45 minutes after the accident and delivered the citation to Siebens’ wife.

“He said, ‘I hate to add insult to injury,’” says Linda LaScola. “I said, ‘Get out of here.’ We paid the ticket. It was just incredible.”

“As far as issuing citations in hospitals, we do do that,” says Breul. “I’ve had to do that. It’s sometimes looked upon as adding insult to injury, but we’re charged with investigating the accident.”

Even when conscious walkers and bikers are consulted immediately after a crash, they’re not necessarily in a mental state suited to a police interview. Such was the case with Cindy, a cyclist who asked that her last name not be used since she never paid her citation. She was hit by a car in Georgetown in 2003 in an accident she says was more the driver’s fault than her own. Cindy rolled through a stop sign while the driver across the intersection made a left turn with no signal. She blacked out briefly and woke up sobbing in the driver’s arms. While in the back of an ambulance a D.C. officer asked her what happened.

She said, “I don’t know. I guess I went through the stop sign.” That concluded the interview. The officer handed her a $50 ticket, which she ignored. “I thought it was ludicrous,” she says.

As for Wiseman, she recently appealed her ticket by mail with the D.C. Department of Motor Vehicles. She says she'd like to sue the driver, but the two lawyers she's reached out to declined to take her case. After all, Wiseman had been found at fault and had no memory of the incident.

“Honestly, I don’t know anything. All I know is what I do every day,” which doesn’t involve crosswalks, she says.

She recently had a titanium plate put in her cheek and has only limited feeling on the right side of her face due to nerve damage. Until recently she wasn't able to eat solid food or leave her bed, and an upcoming two-month-long trip to Europe has been scuttled. She's looking at several thousand dollars in hospital bills, even though she's insured. And she says she doesn’t think she’ll be Rollerblading any time soon, if ever again.

"Everybody says, 'Who Rollerblades anymore?'" says Wiseman. “It’s my favorite thing. But I think it might be over now.”