It's been 35 years since John Parker died after a pickup collided with the bike he was riding on Cheek Road in east Durham before school. He was 6. His mother, Deborah Melvin-Muse, doesn't display photos of him, the second-youngest of six children.
His brother's birthday was the day after the crash — and he hasn't celebrated it since. An older brother carries a deep sense of guilt because he was looking after John that morning. And Cheek Road, in a predominantly Black neighborhood, still lacks sidewalks for children to safely make their way to the local elementary school.
This, despite the years community activists and academic researchers have spent pleading with city leaders for safety improvements along the busy thoroughfare with sloping shoulders where John died. Drivers zoom along Cheek Road in the Merrick-Moore neighborhood, which connects downtown Durham to industrial sites and newer suburban developments. Melvin-Muse moved her family out of the neighborhood after John's death.
"Now when I go down there, I look and see, you know, nothing really changed,” she said. “It still looks the same." Cheek Road has been "identified as needing improvements" by a local metropolitan planning board, said Erin Convery, Durham's transportation planning manager, in an email.
"The infrastructure that exists is not well implemented," concluded a May preliminary report produced by University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill students who collected data on speeding, noise, and air qualit.
