LAS VEGAS, Nev. (FOX5) – Arbor View High School students, staff and parents are remembering the life of high school senior McKenzie Scott.
An arrest report explains she was crossing the street Friday morning when she was hit and killed by a suspected drunk driver.
Now Sophomore students Isabella Cole and Caden Sano are pushing to make the area safer. They created a petition to get crossing guards, stop lights, and “whatever else at the disposal of our district and city, we can save the lives of students, the way we should have saved the life of McKenzie Scott.” The petition has reached more than 1,400 signatures as of Monday evening.
“Every time I come here I swear there’s kids coming out of there’s people always speeding or not paying attention,” Cole recalled. “This incident that happened with McKenzie I think should be a big awakening.”
“My goal is that no other mother has to grieve over something that can be prevented like traffic accidents on a street as busy as this,” Sano added. “We take a lot of safety things very seriously like fire drills, active shooter drills and what not but it seems like, especially here, there’s a blind spot when it comes to traffic safety seeing as there’s been one death due to traffic safety here at Arbor View and there’s been zero due to fire, a lockdown or active shooter this year so far.”
City of Las Vegas traffic engineers were taking pictures as they evaluated the street’s safety Monday afternoon. It also plans to conduct a traffic study of the area.
A spokesperson told FOX5 it’s already put up dividers on a street near the school last summer after reports of U-turns and other dangerous driving during student drop-off and pick up times.
“One of my biggest problems with it is that it takes a death or an injury to bring awareness to this. The threshold for having a working system shouldn’t be a failure of the existing system because every single day there’s near misses,” Cole explained. “
Cole and Sano believe students need more safeguards.
“McKenzie was a good person, a very kind soul, very free spirited. Always kind, outgoing, friendly, sociable in all aspects,” Cole remembered. “She’s the kind of person who if it were somebody else who was killed in an accident like this, would be on the petition signature list.”
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