DANBURY
With the goal of reducing the potential for accidents, the N.C. Department of Transportation plans to realign an intersection where a student at North Stokes High School was killed in September.
The student's mother would like to see the intersection closed.
On the morning of Sept. 19, Sonia Renee Luster, 16, was driving to school at North Stokes. She was killed when her car collided with an oncoming pickup as she turned left from N.C. 89 onto Clyde Amos Road.
Students at North Stokes often use the unpaved Clyde Amos Road as a shortcut between N.C. 89 and Piney Grove Church Road, which leads to the school. When traveling east on N.C. 89, the intersection with Clyde Amos is a Y, and some drivers don't slow down significantly before turning onto Clyde Amos. And, although there is a stop sign on Clyde Amos at N.C. 89, not all drivers come to a full stop.
The DOT plans to spend about $18,000 to turn the intersection into more of a T.
"Funding has been secured for it," said Pat Ivey, a division engineer for the DOT. The work will probably take place after July 1, he said.
Luster's mother, Dee Luster, said she doesn't think that the change will be sufficient to prevent future accidents.
"It may slow the kids down but it's not going to stop them," Luster said.
She said she would prefer to have Clyde Amos closed at N.C. 89. If that's not possible, she said, she would like to see Clyde Amos turned into a one-way road. Her goal, she told Stokes County commissioners at their regular meeting Monday night, is to do what she can to see that another parent doesn't experience the devastating loss that she has.
"I need to know in my heart that I have done all that I can," she said.
It was Leon Inman, the chairman of the Stokes County Board of Commissioners, who asked the DOT to look into making changes at the intersection after Luster was killed. Having been an assistant principal at North Stokes, he was familiar with the intersection and thought that it could be made safer.
"If we could make a change that would save a life, we needed to do it," Inman said.
DOT officials took a look.
"We did find there was an accident problem there that could be corrected with this improvement," Ivey said.
"It really didn't require any major modification," he said. "We're going to try to bring that intersection more to a right angle. It won't be quite as easy for the kids to turn right out onto the main road."
Inman said that, at the moment, commissioners have no plans to look into closing Clyde Amos, which would require public hearings.
At the meeting on Monday, Clyde Amos and his wife, as well as Michele Hutchins, who also lives on the road, said they support changing the intersection but want to keep the road open.
Dee Luster said she knew that the intersection was a problem before her daughter was killed and had forbidden her daughter to use it as a shortcut.
"Why she took that left, I will never know," she said.
■ Kim Underwood can be reached at 727-7389 or at kunderwood@wsjournal.com.
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