MONUMENTAL ACHIEVEMENTS: Road shrines are the final word in making streets safer

In 2016, Dalton McCreary was walking with a friend across East Iliff Avenue at South Chambers Road when a drunk man careened his car into the intersection at 70 miles per hour.

Toxicology tests later found the man, Christopher Tarr, had a blood alcohol content more than three times the legal limit.

Tarr blew the red light and tried to steer his Toyota 4Runner through a quick left turn, losing control. The car flipped and hurtled toward the two pedestrians walking back from a nearby park.

McCreary pushed his friend, Justin Mulumulu, out of the way, saving his life. But Tarr’s Toyota crushed McCreary. Mulumulu found his friend lying underneath a nearby tree. He later died of his injuries, just 22 years old.

Tarr was later convicted of murder and sentenced to 40 years in prison. Today, a sign stands at the busy intersection where McCreary died.

“Drive safely,” it says. “In memory of Dalton Makepeace McCreary.”

Unlike many other roadside memorials and shrines, the street sign is bare. There are no flowers, streamers or photos adorning the  metal pole.

Erin Agee, McCreary’s aunt, helped raise McCreary. McCreary and Agee’s
daughter were attached at the hip.

“Me and my family never really recovered from it,” Agee said.

She thinks it’s possible most people don’t notice the sign, even if they drive past it every day.

The sign is unadorned because McCreary, oddly, had told Agee he wouldn’t want a memorial if he was killed on the road.

Agee and other family decided a sign, though, might help people understand that driving drunk — or  sober recklessly, for that matter — can be homicidal.

“I think sometimes, when you see something constantly, constantly, constantly, you don’t realize you are seeing it but it is planting a seed in your brain,” Agee said of the sign.

“We didn’t want that to be the memorial site,” she added. “We wanted him to be remembered in life, not the place he died.”

The nondescript, blue street sign bearing McCreary’s name is one of many in Aurora and Colorado serving as a warning to drivers, although it is unclear exactly how many dot the region.

Although many drivers may hardly register their message, the signs themselves are symbols of intense trauma, healing and remembrance for the families of people killed by drunk drivers and those distracted behind the wheel.

The blue signs are familiar landmarks across Aurora and the metro area.

City government doesn’t have a list of how many are on city streets, said Julie Patterson, a city spokesperson.

Patterson said the memorials are one way the city is trying to encourage safety on the roads, with crashes and fatalities increasing somewhat in recent years.

Total traffic crashes have hovered around 13,500 in the last four years, according to Commander Jad Lannigan, a spokesman for the Aurora Police Department’s traffic division. Collisions resulting in injuries generally increased from 308 in 2016 to 336 in 2019.

Deaths are on the rise as well. In 2014, 19 people died in Aurora car crashes. But in 2019, 33 people died from traffic collisions, 13 of them pedestrians or cyclists. Lannigan said that between 28 and 30 annual traffic fatalities is now more or less the average for Aurora.

The Colorado Department of Transportation takes the reins on memorial signs on its own roads in Aurora, including East Colfax Avenue and Havana Street south of East Sixth Avenue.

That state agency said there are roughly 230 signs listed as standing on roads across Colorado. 

Family members of people killed in driving incidents can apply to CDOT or Aurora government. CDOT charges $100 to install a sign and maintain it for six years. Then, the state agency says it removes it and gives it back to the victim’s family.

Aurora’s sign program is free, but City staff are supposed to remove the sign after three years.

The blue signs aren’t just for drunk driving victims.

Look even closer, and you’ll find that different signs say different things. Some can have multiple names. All will bear the name of at least one victim while reflecting the different circumstances of their deaths, reading “Don’t drink and drive” for cases involving alcohol like McCreary’s, “Please drive safely” for general fatalities or “Please ride safely” for cyclist and motorcyclist deaths.

Those are CDOT’s options for signage, but cities and towns in Colorado can have their own text.

Patterson said the signs on Aurora-controlled roads can read, “Don’t Do Drugs & Drive”, “Don’t Text & Drive”, “Drive Safely” or “Don’t Drink & Drive.”

Although Tarr was drunk when he killed McCreary, that sign doesn’t bear a warning not to drink and drive.

Instead, it bears a simple warning to drive carefully.

Agee would prefer it bore the warning against drunk driving, given McCreary’s horrific death.

The anti-drunk driving group Mothers Against Drunk Driving will reach out to families and pay for memorial signs erected in honor of victims. Agee is close with staff at the group, but she let a family member handle the sign business instead, landing on verbiage she said can be ambiguous. In reading the sign, it’s not clear how McCreary died. He could have been texting and driving himself and crashed into a pole, or hit by a driver while biking.

Agee said she would prefer the sign read “Don’t Drink & Drive.”

That’s the verbiage on a different blue sign bearing the name Alicia Ruth Larson near the intersection of South Parker Road and East Dartmouth Avenue.

Parker Road, also known as state Highway 83, is under CDOT control.

The jurisdiction isn’t important for Jason Larson, Alicia’s brother.

Alicia “knew what she wanted in life,” Jason said of her. By 2005, although just 18 years old, Alicia had developed a strong faith in God and wanted to work with children, educating the next generation.

That year, a drunk driver hit her.

The Denver Post reported then that 25-year-old Shannon Jean Obel hit Alicia in her Monte Carlo. Then, another driver did as well. Alicia was killed. Jason said the second driver was never found.

For about 15 years, the sign bearing Alicia’s name has warned drivers heading northwest on Parker Road. That’s long after CDOT’s time limit of six years.

Last Friday, cars hurtled down Parker Road past the sign, which bore a bouquet of wilted flowers.

Jason said his other sister sometimes places flowers and tidies up around the sign. But he, his mother and his father won’t go near the place.

“I’ve always loved Aurora,” said Jason, who lives near the Southlands Mall. “But I can’t go back to that part a lot. It brings back a lot of negative memories.”

Still, he’s glad the sign still stands.

The City of Aurora’s signs are only supposed to be up for a year, but McCreary’s still stands as well.

It’s possible city and state governments don’t strain themselves to enforce the time limits, given their sensitive nature.

SIMPLE MEMORIALS

Roadside crosses and make-shift shrines can be a different story.

Bedazzled with hearts, photos and religious iconography, makeshift memorials are attempts to commemorate the life of a loved one exactly where they died. They are tucked into roadside shrubs and barriers, such as a bundle of beads and flowers on South Parker Road near East
Mississippi Avenue.

Pulling over at a crowded intersection to lay a wreath, let alone on a busy highway or interstate, can be dangerous.

Plus, wind from fast-passing cars and the elements can reduce many shrines to rubbish piles quickly if they aren’t maintained. That could mean love ones spending more time on the side of the road, causing more danger.

As such, Aurora city code outlaws “unauthorized signs or devices” which may be removed by City staff, Patterson said, if they “create a visibility concern or a hazard in the public right-of-way.”

But the city will still store the make-shift memorial materials so that the owner can pick them back up, she said. Staff might also try to work with the owner to find a proper home for the memorial.

But across the U.S., it’s common for authorities to turn a blind eye when encountering victim shrines, Jim Hill said. Based in Indiana, Hill runs an online registry of official memorials and informal shrines, called roadsidememorialregistry.com. In the last five years, he’s personally photographed and tagged hundreds.

For Hill, the signs and shrines are generally good warnings.

“When you get behind the wheel, you need to say, ‘I can die today,’” he said.

His background working for Ford taught him that driving is much more dangerous than people think. His job involved watching old Ford models crash into concrete walls as part of safety analyses.

Seeing cars constantly crumple into tin cans made him think.

“Talk about a sick feeling. People are pretty naive,” he said.

Hill said he became fascinated with the memorials: Some were beautiful and well-maintained, while others were precariously placed and falling apart. He thinks they are an opportunity to get other drivers to think about the danger.

In his travels cataloging shrines, Hill began to notice some trends. Often times, makeshift
memorials are tucked before and after on-ramps.

The personal stories he’s uncovered are sometimes jarring.

Once, Hill came across a group of people making a roadside memorial in Michigan. Hill said he pulled over and gently approached a man, telling him about his project and interest in memorials.

But Hill said the man was himself a drunk driver responsible for the death of a relative. He’d been drunk and crashed his car, killing his passenger.

“I didn’t even know what to say,” Hill told The Sentinel.

A PUSH FOR SAFER STREETS

The deaths of Alicia Larson and Dalton McCreary
permanently changed their families.

Today, Jason Larson has absolutely no tolerance for drinking and driving. He said the penalties should be much higher, including having your license revoked for one
infraction. Drunken driving also caused another rift in his family, recently, when his wife was caught doing so. He said it caused a big fight.

Larson wants to be a cop responsible for pulling over drunk drivers. He’s charting a career change in law enforcement, working at an area prison and hoping to join the Aurora
Police Department.

Erin Agee, McCreary’s aunt, took to advocacy.

She volunteers for Mothers Against Drunk Driving, speaking at local “victim impact” meetings required for drunk drivers.

Agee said the meetings are large. About 100 people, all
convicted of drunk driving, are regularly packed into the weekly meetings at local schools and public buildings.

There, she tells McCreary’s story.

But she said the stories have their limits. McCreary’s killer, a multiple DUI offender, had himself attended
court-mandated meetings before racing down Chambers Road that night in 2016.