Lovie Sanders, a 39-year-old Forest Park woman who was a teaching coach in Chicago public schools, was struck and killed by a car the morning of Sept. 14 while crossing Madison Street, apparently on her way to Starbucks before work.

Sanders, of the 800 block of Ferdinand Avenue, had parked her car near 7233 Madison St., about 25 feet west of Elgin Avenue. As she crossed the street towards Starbucks, she walked in between two east-bound cars stopped in traffic. She was not in a pedestrian crosswalk, police said.

At the time, “traffic on Madison, due to the morning rush hour, was backed up all the way to Marengo,” said Police Chief Jim Ryan.

As Sanders was walking in between the cars, Raul Andrade, a 47-year-old from Chicago, was driving a 1993 Toyota Corolla east-bound in the west-bound lane to make a left turn on Elgin Avenue. While driving in the wrong lane at approximately 8:10 a.m., Andrade’s vehicle hit Sanders, police said.

Sanders was still alive at the scene and “talking and communicating” as she was taken to Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood, Ryan said. She died in the emergency room about an hour later.

Police called the incident a traffic accident and charged Andrade with driving into oncoming traffic.

Sanders, who taught at both the high school and college level, was described as “very career and goal-focused,” according to Daphne Hooks, who grew up with Sanders and knew her family for many years through their church, Family Altar Evangelistic Baptist Church, on Chicago’s West Side.

“She was smart, very serious, and very well-educated,” Hooks said. “She was just a happy young lady.”

Hooks said that Sanders was also passionate about teaching.

“She always talked about how she wanted to teach little children,” Hooks said. “And they just gravitated toward her, too.”

For the last three years, Sanders taught English primarily to high school freshmen and sophomores at North Lawndale College Prep in Chicago.

“She was very close to many of the students and faculty here,” said Nicole Howard, principal at North Lawndale. “She was a very caring and giving person, often staying here quite late till six or seven o’clock at night working with students and tutoring students, even those who weren’t in her classes. … She is greatly going to be missed.”

Starting this school year, Sanders worked full-time as a teaching coach for the Academy for Urban School Leadership, which is a nonprofit educational management organization that monitors Chicago Public Schools. She had been assigned to instruct and offer support to teachers at Orr Academy in Chicago “to help them teach more effectively,” according to the AUSL. Along with this post, she continued to teach at North Lawndale on Saturdays.

Sanders also recently started teaching a literacy course to students earning their master’s degree in education at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

“She had only taught for four weeks and she had already had an impact on” the students, said Yolanda Majors, director of secondary education at UIC.

Majors originally knew Sanders from North Lawndale, where she said Sanders focused on struggling students and taught them how to read.

“The one thing I could really say about Lovie is that she was really committed to teaching, specifically to low-performing and under-resourced students in school,” Majors said.