A teenage girl died on a Sacramento-area road with no sidewalk. Why did Shawn die there too?
On the first day after the car crash, Shawn Jordan was still talking in his hospital bed. His parents had a clawing hope: Their boy would live.
Shawn had floppy purple hair, and he was always writing poems on his phone. The day he was hit by a car, he’d been walking home from the bus stop.
He was just 18, and he told his parents he wanted to be a rock star. He composed songs about the moon and posted them online. He insisted to his mother he was going to move into his own apartment (With money you earned from what job? Marie Martinez thought, endeared and a little exasperated).
He was the sweetest person his parents had ever met, and he could be infuriating. So, a teenager.
When Marie was pregnant with Shawn, she and her then-husband, Seth Jordan, were worried at first. She found out she was pregnant again just a few months after giving birth to their first child, Seth Jr. It was overwhelming. She cried.
Still, she wanted the baby. On Dec. 12, 2005, Shawn was born with the tiniest hands and feet. He was almost a month premature, and he refused to eat, so Marie fed him through a tube for months. Her two sons were less than a year apart in age, and while Seth Sr. worked, she was mostly at home alone with them. She was exhausted.
But Shawn needed his mother, and she needed to see him thrive.
Now her boy was in the hospital with tubes coming out of his body.
The California Highway Patrol said Shawn was struck by the driver of a red Mitsubishi Lancer on June 15. He was just around the corner from his dad’s house. On the street where the car slammed into him, the speed limit is 40 mph. He was walking in the bike lane on the overpass that crosses the train tracks because the county has not built sidewalks over the entirety of Walerga Road — not even after another teenager died crossing Walerga in 2007.
Shawn was hit 17 years and one day later. Five days after that, his heart stopped beating in the hospital.
Seth Jr. stayed in the room with Marie while she spent three hours with her son’s body. If she didn’t leave the room, the mother reasoned, maybe it wasn’t real.
She couldn’t bring herself to leave until he was cold.
Who’s to blame for deadly car crashes?
Shawn was just 18 months old when Megan Smith crossed Walerga Road on June 14, 2007.
She was 16. It was the last thing she ever did.
Megan’s older sister, Randii Hunter, blamed herself for years. If she hadn’t been at work and had just given Megan a ride that day, she thought to herself, then Megan wouldn’t have been on foot, and she wouldn’t have died. Her father, Terry, blamed himself, too: If he had just been more patient with Megan a few weeks before the crash, she wouldn’t have moved to her mom’s house in a huff, and so she wouldn’t have been on the road with her boyfriend, and she wouldn’t have died.
The Sacramento Bee’s 2007 story suggested a third person to blame, quoting a CHP lieutenant who called the hit-and-run driver “the person responsible.”
Little notice went to the one thing local officials had the power to change: the road itself.
So when Shawn walked down Walerga 17 years after Megan did, he encountered the same speeding cars, the same four wide lanes, the same street design that doesn’t force drivers to slow.
And then he suffered the same fate.
A family says goodbye to a teenager
The memorial was so packed that a few people sat on the floor.
On July 28, black and purple balloons floated by the entrance at the Rusch Park Community Center, and Shawn’s guitar was propped on a table by a guestbook and a purple urn. Sal Eldridge, Shawn’s boyfriend, had already gotten the jagged line that measured his last heartbeats tattooed on his forearm. Many people in the room had a version of the same tattoo; Eldridge’s fed into two stars and a little crescent moon. Shawn used to write him poems every day, lines like “i can’t go an hour without loving you.”
Seth Sr. stood up to speak first and, voice rattling, told the crowd he was “kind of breaking down a little bit.” A few of Shawn’s peers took the microphone and told silly stories of teenage debauchery. One of his aunts, Liz Ames, saw another side of him: “He was just so young, so kind and quiet and innocent.”
Seth Jr., 19, said he hadn’t been hanging out with his brother very much lately, “but as kids, I used to protect him a lot. And it feels like — ” he started to cry.
He could barely form the words: “I wasn’t there to protect him when he needed it the most.”
Eldridge, 17, didn’t speak publicly, but he walked to the front of the room with Shawn’s younger sister, Lennox, 10, and stood next to her while she spoke. Lennox used to spend hours with Shawn in his room, just chatting and listening to music.
The small girl gave a short eulogy. Wearing her pink glasses and one of the custom black T-shirts that said “Rock in Paradise,” she said, “Shawn was the greatest brother I ever had.” She turned to her living older brother, Seth Jr., and said, “No offense.” People laughed.
She listed the things Shawn loved: His family, Eldridge, his friends, and his cat, a tabby named Razzle.
“He was really sweet,” she said. She sat back down. Her memorial T-shirt was much too big, but her mom told her she would grow into it.
A history of serious crashes with little county action
The Sacramento County Department of Transportation investigates every fatal crash on an unincorporated road. Records for the response to Megan’s crash have been destroyed in accordance with the department’s seven-year record retention policy, county spokesman Matt Robinson said, and so it what exactly came of the investigation is unclear.
UC Berkeley’s Transportation Injury Mapping System shows that a crash severely injured pedestrians at Walerga and Kirkby Way in both 2015 and 2017, just north of where Shawn was hit, but the county doesn’t automatically investigate non-fatal crashes.
In 2018, 2021 and 2023, vehicle-only crashes severely injured people in cars on either side of the overpass. Robinson confirmed those three collisions were not investigated.
The county has not begun its investigation into Shawn’s death, he said, because the CHP has not finished its own report.
Megan was hit within a quarter-mile north of the crash that killed Shawn.
She was not on the overpass, but she was crossing the street between where Shawn was hit and Keema Avenue — a stretch of Walerga that, on the west side, has no sidewalk.
The current conditions effectively present drivers with a speedway. North of the overpass, stoplights control traffic at Keema Avenue, right next to Highlands High School. Between Keema and Oakhollow Drive, 0.7 miles down the road that is lined with homes, there is one stoplight at Kirkby Way and no other infrastructure that would stop a car hurtling through the neighborhood and over the bridge. If southbound drivers hit a green at Keema and at Kirkby, they could conceivably travel more than a mile — past all those homes — legally, without slowing down.
The overpass itself has no sidewalk at all, except for a small patch that abruptly begins and ends in the middle of the west side. Pedestrians must use the narrow bike lane, passing between a concrete wall and fast-moving vehicles.
That is the only nearby path into the North Highlands neighborhood where Shawn lived. The next-closest road in is more than a mile away.
Usually, to avoid the overpass, Shawn took a different bus, or got off at another stop to walk the long way home, his stepmom Aubrey Fong said. He’d eaten lunch with Eldridge the day of the crash, and he was coming home earlier than usual: It was still light out. Wearing his purple bell bottoms, he decided to walk across the overpass. He had plans the next day.
Over the past few years, Shawn had been a little adrift. The isolation of the early pandemic took a toll on him, and he eventually dropped out of high school. But he had begun “to own who he wanted to be,” Seth Sr. said, “and developed such a flair.” He fell in love with Eldridge. He wrote music.
One piece was missing: His parents both wanted him to get a job or take classes, to aim for something. On that Friday, he agreed to sit down with his dad that Sunday — Father’s Day — to sign up for GED courses. Shawn had already picked out the classes he wanted to take.
Seth Sr. was relieved.
Then his son never made it home.
‘A sidewalk doesn’t take that much effort’
After Megan was hit by a car and killed, her family shattered.
Randii, five years older than Megan, said the younger girl had always been shy and quiet. As a teenager, though, Randii saw her change.
“She really was growing into herself,” Randii said. “And so it would have been really, you know, nice, to actually be able to see her live out her dreams.”
Maybe Megan would have worked with animals, Randii thought. She would have grown up and had a bedroom without pictures of celebrities she cut out of magazines plastered all over the walls.
Instead, Megan had a crowded funeral on June 21, 2007.
Two years later, Randii essentially fled to Tennessee. She couldn’t handle the absence of her little sister.
But she continued to follow Sacramento news online. In late June, she logged on to Facebook, she saw a terribly familiar headline, and she clicked.
“I just was like, ‘Oh my god. That’s the same road. That’s crazy. There’s still no sidewalks,’” she said. “It’s hurtful. Once my sister lost her life, it’s like, ‘OK, well, how can we make this more safe?’ Like, I know California is a big state. There’s money there for them to do improvements. A sidewalk doesn’t take that much effort.”
She said that since her sister’s death, her family has been “left with this empty void.”
And for what? she thought. Sacramento County hadn’t even built a sidewalk.
Endless mourning after fatal car crashes
The grief borne by Shawn’s family is much fresher.
Marie didn’t have a great relationship with her own mother, and so she’d made a rule with Shawn and her other children: At least 10 times a day they would say I love you, “even if we’re fighting.” She wanted her kids to know she loved them. Since Shawn died, Marie has stifled some of her emotions. “I have to keep going,” she said, “not just for myself but for the three of them” — Lennox, Seth Jr. and her older daughter, Christina Richardson.
For two months after the car crash, Seth Sr. was usually able to make it through the day, and then at night, he got drunk. In August, he was hospitalized for pancreatitis. He almost drank himself to death.
“I can’t describe how hard it is,” he said, “to watch your kid die.”
He didn’t want anyone else to experience it.
Being in his home in North Highlands is tough. Pictures of his son are everywhere, all reminders of the teenager’s stylish flair and silly giggles. “It was such an adventure watching him begin to own who he wanted to be,” Seth Sr. said. The fact that Shawn didn’t get a chance to see it through, and that Seth Sr. didn’t get to watch to watch him see it through, broke him.
Megan’s father knows their pain too well. “Time eases stuff,” Terry said, “but it never takes it away.” Nearly two decades after Megan’s death, he started to cry as he talked about her.
He agreed with Seth Sr. It wasn’t something a parent should be forced to endure.
A parent’s love
One day around 1995, Terry was at home with Megan when he realized she’d disappeared. The girl was maybe 4, and he started to panic. Not in the living room, not in the bedroom, not in any of the closets. He started searching the street, recruiting neighbors to help. There was something feral coursing through him.
After about 40 minutes, he found her — peacefully sleeping under her bed, the one place he hadn’t checked. She was fine. He scooped her up and cradled her little body, touched her strawberry blond curls.
The father had been in hysterics, thinking he would never see his baby again.
Until she was hit and killed on a dangerous county road in 2007, that was the worst feeling he ever had.
This story was originally published August 29, 2024 at 5:00 AM.
