Paul McManus was killed five years ago. His family is still waiting for justice

Every time she passes a green light at an intersection, Jennifer McManus thinks of her 40-year-old son Paul.

In October 2021, the Melbourne-born tech engineer was riding home on his motorcycle from a James Taylor concert when a driver allegedly ran a red light and struck him at a busy intersection in San Francisco’s Mission District.

He was taken to hospital with critical injuries after 11pm and died before midnight.

The woman allegedly driving the grey Jeep Compass, Breanna Gordon, then aged 32, was charged with misdemeanour vehicular manslaughter and released from police custody.

The man in Gordon’s passenger seat – identified as her boyfriend at the time – fled the scene before police arrived due to having two active warrants out for his arrest, according to police allegations.

Thousands of kilometres away in the Victorian town of Aireys Inlet, Jennifer McManus was in the shower after spending the day at the beach with her family when her daughter, Sarah, took a call from Paul’s wife, Fern, in California.

“I knew it was midnight there, and Fern wouldn’t usually ever call us, it was always Paul’s phone, so I instantly thought something was wrong,” Sarah recalls.

“She was upset, and she said, ‘There’s been an accident’, and she was like, ‘Well, Paul’s dead’. Mum was in the shower, and we were just in shock.”

In San Francisco, Fern remembers going out to search for Paul when he didn’t return home that night. She recalls remaining oddly calm after arriving at the scene of the crash when she went out to look for him, a habit she picked up from her husband, whom she describes as “devastatingly funny” and one of the “most brilliant people I’ll ever know”.

“He had this sort of code of behaviour where he would not freak out about anything before he had all the facts,” Fern says. “I remember when the worst imaginable happened, I found myself grateful that he had helped equip me with this toolkit of how to deal with horrible things.”

The pair met in Mexico while travelling with friends a decade earlier and bonded over a conversation about the famous oceanographer Sylvia Earle. They were married for more than a year when he died.

Six weeks after the crash, Gordon failed to appear for a court arraignment hearing and for three years the case lingered in pre-trial status due to a backlog of pending cases caused by COVID-19.

When the case was finally set for trial in June 2024, Gordon again failed to show in court and a bench warrant was issued for her arrest. Despite ongoing pleas to US authorities to track her down, family members say they were told there were not enough police resources to locate her.

“She [Gordon] hasn’t had a period of not driving, that we know of,” Jennifer says.