Organizers said the event is to raise money and road safety awareness. Another motorcycle rider died in a similar area of freeway three weeks before the crash.
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Coin-Op Game Room, an arcade-themed bar, will host a fundraiser Monday night in Sacramento to support the family of a man killed in a motorcycle crash earlier this month.
While it’s usually closed Mondays, the bar will instead offer free pizza, $5 iced teas and arcade game plays from 5-10 p.m. June 2 to raise money for the wife and son of 39-year-old North Highlands native Kelly Boyer. Boyer died after a motorcycle crash Saturday, May 3, near the Interstate 5 and Highway 50 connector.
“We will be donating 100% of sales and tips on this night to help support Kelly’s family,” the bar wrote in an Instagram post.
Boyer’s mother, 56-year-old Rhonda Butler, works as a security guard at Coin-Op and came up with the event with other bar staff.
Peter Riccobono, Coin-Op’s regional manager, says the business just wants to be there for their employees and is happy to host this fundraiser on behalf of Butler, who’s worked there for over a year. A majority of Coin-Op’s staff reportedly volunteered to donate their time for Monday’s event and not everyone who offered to work was scheduled.
Butler indicated the fundraiser is two-pronged: she wants to raise money for her family and awareness of motorcycle safety. On certain parts of Highway 50, there’s fencing above guardrails, however, there isn’t any in the area where her son crashed, she said.
The California Highway Patrol said Boyer’s motorcycle went over the guardrail and was found near the Front Street Animal Shelter. Roughly three weeks before Boyer’s death, 50-year-old Shaun Sutterfield’s motorcycle collided with a vehicle in a similar spot. Sutterfield fell off the freeway and died at Front Street and Broadway.
“If there was fencing there, you would be tossed back onto the road, not over the side of the freeway,” Butler said. “What happened to my son should not happen to another person.”
Who was Kelly Boyer?
Boyer tried to do right by everyone he met, according to his mother.
He loved baseball, played T-ball the moment he could hold a bat and coached his 10-year-old son and many other children in Antelope’s Little League for the past seven or eight years, she said.
“The very first word he said was, ‘ball,’ I swear to God,” Butler said.
Butler said her son touched a lot of lives though he only lived 39 years, and he drove a garbage truck for roughly the last decade because he wanted to give back to his community.
Hundreds attended a candlelight vigil organized earlier this month in his memory, she said.
Butler told ABC10 outside of motorcycle safety she wants people to live every day to the fullest and tell their loved ones they care about them, because you never know what can happen.
“It sounds kind of corny, but that’s really what I want people to know,” she said.
Coin-Op in Sacramento is located at 908 K St.
