COBB COUNTY, Ga. — Georgia crossing guards direct traffic before and after school every day, creating visibility to make drivers pay attention and keep kids safe.
“They see us, you know, because we have on all these bright colors,” said Cobb County crossing guard Virgil Woods. “They just think that we just out there holding up a sign.”
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In 2022, a vehicle hit Woods while he was working outside Osborne High School. He spent nearly a week in the hospital.
“I didn’t have no feelings in my leg, my head was hurting, blood was running down my arm,” he said. “When they hit me, the guy said he didn’t see me because the sun was in his eyes.”
After the accident, his daughter encouraged him to follow the lead of his wife Thelma, who quit her job as a crossing guard in 2010.
“My daughter said ‘Daddy, don’t go back to work. You don’t have to go back,’” Virgil Woods said. “I said no.”
He was one of hundreds of crossing guards hit across the country in the last decade and one of 19 hit by vehicles in Georgia since 2017. One Georgia crossing guard was killed during that period.
Channel 2 Action News Investigates teamed up with our sister stations across the country and the Associated Press to document more than 225 crossing guard accidents in the last 10 years.
But there are likely many more. Massachusetts and New Jersey are the only states that keep track of crossing guards hit every year, and no one tracks the total nationwide.
Our months long investigation scoured news reports and social media to compile crossing guards who were hit. We contacted law enforcement for all 231 accidents and obtained police records and outcomes for 180.
More than 70% of drivers who hit crossing guards received just traffic tickets or no charges at all.
At least 32 of the crashes were deadly, including the crash that killed Cobb County crossing guard Edna Umeh near Lindley Middle School in 2017.
The driver who hit her, Lamonte Whitaker, served five years in prison and was released from jail in 2023 to serve the rest of his 15-year sentence on parole.
Former lawmaker Erica Adeyemi attended his court hearings with Umeh’s family. She pushed for legislation in the Georgia House of Representatives in Umeh’s memory.
“I’m sure being out on parole is not what they want,” Adeyemi said. “They still can’t get up in the morning and say hello to their mother.”
Umeh was a crossing guard for Adeyemi’s children, and she visited the crash scene on Veterans Memorial Highway.
“These are our kids, and we have to ‘slow down’ just like Edna would say,” Adeyemi said, invoking the late crossing guard. “They knew and loved her, and they saw her die in front of them.”
The law Adeyemi introduced eventually passed in another bill, authorizing schools to enforce speed limits with cameras.
“It’s proven that they are working,” Adeyemi said. “However, when you think about the other side of it, speeding detecting cameras can’t help with distracted drivers.”
Among the data we compiled, Georgia led the nation with at least 19 crossing guard accidents in the last 10 years.
Forty of the 231 crashes were hit and run accidents. In at least six of those, law enforcement was never able to identify the driver who fled the scene. Two of those were in Georgia, in Henry and Bibb counties.
Virgil Woods was hit after the new Georgia law passed. He was 71 years old at the time.
A popular job with senior citizens and retirees, more than half of the crossing guards for whom we could identify ages were over 65 at the time of the crash.
Still, Woods says he’s not ready to hang up his yellow vest.
“I love what I do, and I think they say the students love me,” he said. “When you get to that school zone, it’s at 25 miles, 35 miles now. Respect us because we’re there.”
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