The Road That Killed Legend Jenkins Was Working as Designed

Summary

On May 27, 2025, two brothers in Gastonia, North Carolina, asked their dad if they could walk to the neighborhood Food Lion and Subway. It was less than ten minutes from their apartment.Their dad hesitated. He and his wife are protective parents. But he agreed, on the condition that the boys stay on the phone with him the whole way. They made it to the store and back toward home without incident, until they reached West Hudson Boulevard.Legend Jenkins, seven years old, stepped off the median into the road and was struck by an SUV. His father was still on the phone when it happened.In the days that followed, the family’s grief deepened into something almost unimaginable. Two days after their son’s death, the district attorney charged both parents with involuntary manslaughter, set bail at $1.5 million each, and placed their surviving six children in the care of relatives.I’ve seen pedestrian advocates respond to this case with outrage: “Kids should be able to walk to the store. Parents shouldn’t be criminalized for it.” I understand that impulse. I agree with the sentiment. But when I look at the location where Legend died, I can honestly tell you that nobody — child or adult — should be walking there.West Hudson Boulevard is a high-speed arterial road with narrow sidewalks, a tiny median, and no truly safe crossings. Even a healthy, alert adult is taking their life in their hands by walking to that store. For a child, it’s playing the worst kind of roulette.If this were a neighborhood where people regularly fired guns in the air, we would warn parents to keep their kids inside. A stray bullet may not be intentional, but it’s a predictable outcome of such an environment. On West Hudson Boulevard, the stray bullets are motor vehicles, and the result is the same: occasional, random, but entirely foreseeable deaths.This wasn’t an “accident” in the sense of something random or unexpected. It was the statistically inevitable outcome of building a place where human life ou...