The highway patrol rarely includes whether the rider was wearing a helmet when an accident occurs because the police reports do not provide a checkbox for that information. Only 88 of more than 14,000 records contained information about whether a rider was wearing a helmet.

David Maletsky, a 40-year-old Alameda cyclist who writes for the Cyclelicious blog, said he believes he has never been in an accident because his father often recited the traffic rules to him from the driver’s seat of his truck. Maletsky now does the same while driving with his 9-year-old son.

Adithya Sambamurthy/The Bay Citizen

Bonnie Wehmann teaches a workshop on Bicycle Safety in Alameda on Saturday, May 28, 2011

“Young people are learning all the time,” Maletsky said, “whether you are teaching or not.”A few weeks after Brandon Sorensen’s accident, Bonnie Wehmann, the East Bay Bicycle Coalition’s education director, led a three-and-a-half-hour workshop in an Alameda church basement, offering instruction on equipment, safety and the law.

Wehmann’s workshop drew mostly adults, but a few teenagers went with their parents.

“To be honest, we really wanted to do the workshop after the accident happened,” said Judy Kleppe, who came with her son Will Schmidt. “The more knowledge about it we have as parents, the less fear we’ll have letting them go out there.”

Will, 15, said he learned where to ride to make himself more visible to motorists and how to avoid open car doors. He said he was still confident he could protect himself despite accidents like the one that killed Brandon.

“I know how rare it is,” he said of such collisions. “It doesn’t make me want to stay off the roads.”

Hundreds of community members turned out last week for Brandon’s memorial service. They filled every chair and lined the Lincoln Middle School gymnasium walls three deep. For many students, Brandon was the first person they had ever known to die.

Isaiah Zulu, 12, said he and Brandon were “shooting hoops” the day of the accident. Brandon left on his bike but never made it home. Isaiah was home sick the next day when he heard the news from his mother.

“I just broke into tears,” Isaiah said. “We sat next to each other on the first day of school.”

Mourners heard from Brandon Stanford, a family friend, who said Brandon Sorensen had saved up for a new bicycle by doing odd jobs around the neighborhood. He kept his money in a plastic bag and had recently sold two old bicycles on Craigslist.

When the Sorensens spotted the perfect Italian touring bike at a garage sale recently, they called their son and said the owner was asking for $50.

Offer him $40, he said, according to Brandon Stanford. Through their tears, the mourners laughed.

Brandon was riding that bike the day he died.

This article also appears in the Bay Area edition of The New York Times.