Man, 20, Killed in Crash Aspired to Save Lives

The way his friends and family tell it, Arnell Robinson was supposed to be saving lives, not dead less than a month after his 20th birthday, killed blocks from where he lived in Northwest Washington.

Robinson, an aspiring District firefighter, was fatally injured Friday when his dirt bike and an unmarked D.C. police car crashed in the 400 block of O Street just before 3 p.m. Authorities said he was taken to the hospital with what initially were thought to be non-life-threatening injuries but was pronounced dead at 8:40 p.m.

"It was senseless, and it was stupid," Robinson's best friend, Thomas Washington, said yesterday of the death.

Washington, an emergency medical technician who described himself as more of a brother than friend to Robinson, said he was standing outside Friday afternoon, listening to the sound of the dirt bike approaching, when the crash occurred.

"I heard the shzzzzzz, poof," he said, and he ran to the scene. "When I got to him, he was moaning, he was gurgling. You could tell he was in a lot of pain but didn't know what happened."

Washington remained by his friend's side in the ambulance.

"He was talking to me. He kept asking me what happened," Washington said. "He kept telling me to help him, help him. He couldn't breathe."

Officer Quintin Peterson, a D.C. police spokesman, said the department's major crash unit is investigating the incident. He said it appeared that the police car was stopped when Robinson hit it. The officer driving the car was headed east and had stopped to let several westbound dirt bikes pass when the crash occurred, Peterson said. He did not release the name of the officer.

"Twenty years old," Robinson's mother, Caroline Robinson, said, shaking her head. She was standing outside her son's apartment in the 1300 block of Fifth Street NW. "Just turned 20."

She described her son as funny and intelligent. He graduated from the D.C. National Guard's Youth Challenge Academy in 2007 and took an EMT class as a steppingstone toward becoming a firefighter, a job he had wanted since he was a child, she said.

"All his life," she said. "When he was a little boy, I used to always buy him different firetrucks and fire engines. He just took an interest in it."

Her son, she added, had been accepted into the D.C. fire department's October cadet class, but it was canceled because of funding. He was waiting for the next class to start, she said.