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Man seeks state work at site of fatal crash
By Ed Runyan
SOUTHINGTON
Gary R. Gibson Jr., 52, of Broad Street, Newton Falls, died as a result of his car’s dropping off U.S. Route 422 and hitting a tree at 9:38 a.m. Wednesday, the Ohio State Highway Patrol says
Walter Sherbourne, who maintains the ditch Gibson’s Chevrolet Cavalier dropped into and the tree that Gibson hit says he felt it was only a matter of time until someone got killed at that location. He wishes the state would do something to make the area safer.
“I weed-eated the ditch on Tuesday, and I said ‘This is a tragedy waiting to happen,’ and right away it happened,” Sherbourne said Thursday.
The problem is that traffic traveling past his property toward Warren, just northwest of state Route 305, travels too closely to the berm, he said.
And it takes only a small mistake — a matter of a foot or so — for a driver to drop off the pavement and into the dirt and grass beside it and into a deep ditch.
From there, drivers are faced with a fight for their life to try to bring their vehicle under control.
Five times in the past two years the result has been an accident on Sherbourne’s property, but Wednesday’s accident was the first with a fatality, Sherbourne said.
Because of previous accidents, Sherbourne said he keeps the grass in the ditch mowed to allow drivers to see the steep drop-off, and he has improved part of the ditch within the past year to prevent drivers from hitting a hard culvert near his driveway.
Sherbourne, a business owner who owns dirt-moving equipment, said he would fill in the ditch, but he believes that would lead to drainage problems.
He’s not sure what the answer might be but wishes someone would look into it.
Justin Chesnic, spokesman for the Ohio Department of Transportation, said Thursday he wasn’t aware of the accident but said he would bring it to the attention of ODOT engineers.
Lt. Brian Holt, commander of the Southington Post of the state patrol, said highway patrol statistics indicate that 17 crashes have occurred within a 2-mile stretch near the accident scene in the past four years.
Most accidents along U.S. Route 422 in Southington Township in recent years have resulted from improper lane changes and following too closely, but about 20 percent of the accidents there have been single-vehicle accidents, which usually result from fatigue and inattention, Holt said.
In this case, a witness described the driver as traveling at a high rate of speed just before the accident, so it’s possible that contributed to the crash, Holt said.
“I was on the scene, and whether this was a wide or small berm, he crashed because he had driven off of the roadway,” Holt said.
“This is rural America. There are going to be crashes.”