When Parents Are Charged but the Stroad Is the Culprit
Children crossing a street with multiple wide lanes, a design that encourages drivers to speed and not look for pedestrians. (Original image source: Scott Davies on Flickr.)
Across the country, a troubling pattern is taking shape: Parents are being charged—sometimes even jailed—when their children are struck and killed on dangerously designed roads.
It happened in Gastonia, North Carolina just this year. Seven-year-old Legend Jenkins was trying to cross a five-lane arterial road—with no crosswalk in sight—when he was struck and killed by a driver. Legend was accompanied by his ten-year-old brother who survived the ordeal because he had not yet stepped into the road. Though the 76-year-old motorist wasn’t prosecuted, both of Legend’s parents were arrested on charges of involuntary manslaughter and felony child abuse. Each of them were held on $1.5 million bail.
A similarly heartbreaking story is unfolding in Rochester, New York, where a mother named Cyonna faces prosecution after her son was struck and killed by a driver. Her son Hakeem broke away from her when Cyonna was helping him and other children cross the street. As a result, she has been charged with criminally negligent homicide and endangering the welfare of her child.
At a courthouse protest in Rochester, a demonstrator’s sign read: “Stroads killed Hakeem, not Cyonna.” Local media misquoted the sign as “roads,” glossing over a key point: It’s not just about roads. It’s about stroads—a term we use at Strong Towns to describe thoroughfares that combine complexity with speed. Since these features naturally conflict with one another, stroads are dangerous and sometimes deadly.
Unfortunately, these are not isolated cases. Streetsblog noted a similar case in January 2025, where a mother was arrested for letting her ten-year-old son walk a mile along a rural road that was classified as a highway. Parents from different communities across the United States are being criminalized for allowing their children to do what generations before them did without second thought: cross a street, walk to school, and navigate their neighborhood. Our approach to how we build infrastructure is what is to blame here.
The Blame Is Misplaced
There is nothing radical or reckless about letting your child cross the street. A generation ago, kids biked and played in neighborhoods without incident. The difference today isn’t parenting—it’s the environment. The streets many families rely on daily are designed for speed, not safety.
Most of these crashes occur on high-speed, high-volume arterials where:
Crosswalks are few and far between, often placed close to a mile apart from one another along arterial roads.
Lanes are excessively wide and encourage speeding.
Pedestrian infrastructure is inadequate at best and, in many cases, altogether absent.
Drivers are moving too fast to see or avoid pedestrians.
In these environments, crashes are not “accidents.” They are the predictable result of bad design. Charging parents under these conditions is a cruel misdiagnosis. It places all responsibility on individual behavior, while ignoring the systemic failures that make safe travel impossible.
This kind of criminalization will disproportionately impact families who don’t have reliable private or public transportation and must walk to meet their daily needs.
Worse, it destabilizes families often already in crisis. Survivors face trauma, financial strain, and now—potentially—incarceration or child protective investigations. It doesn’t make other children safer. It just makes their lives harder.
What We Can Do Instead
At Strong Towns, we’ve spent years analyzing crashes in communities across the United States and Canada—and we’ve seen firsthand that these tragedies are often rooted in street design issues and infrastructure shortcomings, rather than individual failure.
If you want to understand how these systems create harm—and what we can do to fix them—start by exploring our Crash Analysis Studio and checking out relevant courses in the Strong Towns Academy. We have the tools, stories, and practical steps communities need to start making streets safer.
Let’s stop punishing parents for failing to overcome impossible odds—and start building streets that don’t endanger our families in the first place.
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Tony is the Community Engagement Coordinator at Strong Towns. Tony believes incremental action and humility are key ingredients to community growth. Prior to joining the team, Tony worked in operations and communications with start-up ventures in the renewable energy and collaborative technology fields. His vocational experience spans across project management, process design, facilitation, fundraising, and organizational development. Tony holds a Master of Arts in Conflict Transformation from the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding. He currently calls Annapolis, Maryland, home.