No Easy Answers In Area Used To Freewheeling Fun
Out west of Seminole Pratt Whitney Road, past 180th Avenue North, Orange Blvd. turns into 70th Road North and leaves suburban homes behind. Then 70th turns into dirt where it meets Hay’s Trail and Antoinette Road. It’s there that you’ll find the wind riffling the row crops and the tops of interlocking canals, whispering over the crosses and candles and other artifacts of remembrance left for Nicholas Bunchuk, 24.
Bunchuk, who grew up in the Acreage/Loxahatchee area, lost his life there in the early morning hours of Nov. 23, when his yellow 2021 Can-Am Renegade went into a canal. Some 36 hours later, friends who’d joined in a search for Bunchuk saw tire tracks at the edge of a canal and maybe the shadow of something in the water.
Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office deputies were called to the scene. A PBSO helicopter hung above. It was night. Deputies said wait. His friends didn’t. They went into the water layered over by lily pads.
The son of Adam and Christine Bunchuk, Nick was raised on 68th Street North. He was a talented baseball player who graduated from Seminole Ridge High School in 2018.
In 2012, he was a slugger who led the Palm Beach Sharks 12-and-under baseball team that made a run at the championship of the Cooperstown Classic in Cooperstown, N.Y., facing off against 103 teams from the United States and Canada.
“Nick was a good player… [and] he was a pistol on the ballfield,” said Brian Healton, who was one of the team’s coaches, along with Nick’s father.
Even today, Nick Bunchuk remains listed on the prefectgame.org scouting site as a 5-foot-8, 150-pound, switch-hitting catcher and utility player.
When Nick’s friend came out of the water, he knew all that was gone. The county medical examiner’s office ruled his death due to massive head trauma and various other severe injuries.
“Everyone wants to have a good time. Everyone wants to have fun, but people are losing their lives,” Indian Trail Improvement District President Elizabeth Accomando said at the Dec. 14 ITID board meeting.
“It’s so hard,” said Accomando, describing herself as a personal friend of the Bunchuk family. “Where do you draw that line, and how do we protect lives?”
Bunchuk is one of four young men from the Acreage/Loxahatchee area who died in 2024 on either an all-terrain vehicle (ATV)/off-highway vehicle (OHV) or a motorcycle.
On Feb. 24, Phillip Clayton McCutcheon, 37, died while riding a 2009 Kawasaki ZX-6R on Okeechobee Blvd., east of C Road.
On Aug. 31, Warren Bryce Vanderplate, 16, died when his 2022 Yamaha TT-R125 trailbike was in volved in a head-on collision with 2008 Infiniti on 60th Street North.
On Nov. 30, Derek Hedrill Machin died when his 2018 Kawasaki Ninja sports bike crashed into a Tesla sedan at the intersection of Seminole Pratt and Town Center Parkway North in Westlake.
Law enforcement officials see the incidents as part of a broader, multi-year trend.
“We’ve seen an uptick in bad driving since COVID-19,” said PBSO Capt. Craig Turner, who oversees the districts covering the Town of Loxahatchee Groves, the City of Westlake, and the unincorporated Acreage/Loxahatchee areas. “People have developed bad habits.”
Turner described it as a “nationwide problem,” citing incidents in which packs of motorcyclists and/or bicyclists have engaged in “street takeovers” ignoring traffic signals, packing intersections and creating traffic jams. “And I’m afraid it’s going to get worse before it gets better,” he said.
In the broad, semi-rural expanse roughly between Southern and Northlake boulevards, and 20-Mile Bend and State Road 7, much of it overseen by ITID, the main problem is individuals on dirt bikes and ATVs taking advantage of the area’s terrain to fly along canal easements, cut across paved streets and intersections, and race around the area’s 262 miles of dirt roads.
“Mostly its juveniles operating these machines,” PBSO Lt. Darla Sauers told the ITID supervisors. “We’ve seen kids as young as 10 out riding them.”
Under state law, ATVs/OHVs may only be operated on unpaved roadways where the posted speed limit is less than 35 miles per hour and only during daylight hours, according to the Florida Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles web site. It also states that anyone under the age of 16 operating an ATV on public land must be under the supervision of an adult and must have proof of completion of a Department of Agriculture & Consumer Services safety course.
“My road patrol team is doing ATV and side-by-side road patrol all the time,” PBSO Sgt. Bert Gaudreau told the supervisors. However, the deputies “can’t go after the kids when they’re in [the woods]. They disappear.”
Historically, the PBSO also has had a no-chase policy related to such violations, believing that going hard after riders creates an unacceptably dangerous scenario for the juveniles and others.
“We try to stop and talk to them about the dangers whenever we can,” Turner said. “But most riders under 21 take off. They run from us.”
ITID Supervisor Betty Argue said the main problem is with ATVs, and “it is not in one specific area. It’s throughout the district.”
Some have suggested the use of County Wildlands Task Force officers who patrol the rough backcountry of the J.W. Corbett Wildlife Management Area adjacent to ITID’s northwest corner. Turner said his deputies are capable of handling ATVs and similar vehicles being driven illegally or dangerously in a suburban environment.
“The wildlands unit is for inside Corbett,” he said. “We have our own ATVs and people qualified to ride them.”
Something that might help the situation, if not solve it, would be an ATV park in the western communities, County Commissioner Sara Baxter said this week. Baxter’s District 6 covers most of the county west of SR 7.
“I think residents would love to have an ATV park to take their family to,” said Baxter, an Acreage resident who rides ATVs along with her husband and sons.
However, many residents balked at a proposal by Baxter to place such a park near the Santa Rosa Groves neighborhood as part of a land-swap proposal between developer GL Homes and the county.
The plan was scuttled in November 2023 when commissioners voted against the swap.
At Baxter’s urging, the county currently is asking for requests for proposals from possible developers for a racing facility at 20-Mile Bend, just south of Southern Blvd. That facility could include an ATV park.
The nearest ATV park is some 60 miles away at Plant Bamboo Mud Park in Okeechobee.
“I think a local ATV park would help,” ITID Supervisor Richard Vassalotti II said.
“They need a place to ride,” Accomando agreed.
With the underage riders, Lt. Sauer said, “Parents need to step up and make these devices not so readily available to their kids.”
Vassalotti said it comes down to parents taking responsibility for their minor children, and residents having the time and gumption to tell fellow parents or authorities when they see a young rider doing something dangerous.
“It’s a challenge, and you guys have that challenge every single day of the year in your job,” Accomando told PBSO officials. “No one wants to take away anyone’s fun… [but] when you’re riding in the road with so many distracted drivers, that’s where the hazards happen.”
A source involved with the search for Bunchuk said that the frustration with some law-breaking ATV riders is understandable, but that there is a different side to the coin — a close-knit community of riders who care about each other.
The source pointed out that while the PBSO made every effort — from ground searches to helicopters — to locate Bunchuk after he was reported missing, in the end, it was the area’s ATV community that found him, defied the darkness and went into the canal after him only 19 days before his 25th birthday.
