Ada County Highway District has no business putting up memorial signs for anyone

The Ada County Highway District should get out of the memorial business.

As Idaho Statesman reporter Nicole Blanchard reported over the weekend, ACHD got into hot water when it erected — at taxpayer expense — a memorial to a young man who drove drunk, with marijuana in his system, speeding in his mother’s car, which he took without permission, ran a red light, and crashed into another car, killing himself and a teenage girl in the other car.

The family of the young man, Devyn Schultz, requested the memorial sign be placed at the site of the crash, causing tremendous pain to the family and friends of the young woman, 15-year-old Ava Sawyer, who was killed in the crash. An innocent victim. Yes, his victim. Had Schultz not died in the crash, certainly, he would have been prosecuted for a serious crime.

The incident has laid bare a misguided practice by ACHD to put up these signs at the request of family members of people who have died, whatever the circumstances, at these sites.

Makeshift memorials are a common sight along Idaho’s highways and smaller roads. They offer, we suppose, some semblance of relief to a grieving family. Some of these impromptu memorials stay up for years, often in more remote stretches of Idaho’s highways. But memorials in well-populated areas, such as this one at McMillan and Five Mile roads, can be an eyesore for those who live there.

It perhaps made sense to ACHD to replace those homemade memorials with a less-obtrusive, more official sign.

But now, as this incident reveals, ACHD must play the role of judge and jury, deciding who is “worthy” of having a sign.

In our opinion, Schultz’s recklessness and his culpability in the death of another person make him unworthy of having a sign. But in some ways, that’s beside the point.

Why is ACHD putting up these signs at all? For anyone?

The highway district adopted its memorial policy in 2015 following the death of 13-year-old Olivia Schnacker, who was hit by a car the previous year while riding her bike through a crosswalk on Ustick Road.

That tragedy is perhaps more understandable, and few would argue with the placement of that sign. But the highway district must now decide where to draw that line in a continuum, from Schnacker to Schultz. What if Schultz hadn’t been drunk and hadn’t been speeding but merely had run a red light? Would that disqualify him for a sign?

As it was, Schultz had a blood alcohol content of 0.223 and was driving at least 87 mph in a 35-mph zone when he ran the red light and not only killed Sawyer, but seriously injured two others — one with a lacerated spleen and concussion and another who suffered a broken neck, multiple facial fractures, a traumatic brain injury, several broken bones in her right hand, a lacerated liver, a punctured lung, a deep puncture to one of her legs and a cut on her face that required 300 stitches and nose reconstruction.

Two Boise teens died in a car crash. ACHD memorialized the drunken driver with a sign

It’s incredible that ACHD would approve of a sign to begin with, given the circumstances.

We’re also troubled by a statement from Schultz’s mother, who said, “That doesn’t make it his fault.” And we’re troubled by ACHD commissioner Kent Goldthorpe’s apparent sympathy with Schultz, whose decisions and actions led to the death of an innocent victim. “Yeah, I understand that one,” Goldthorpe said after Schultz’s mother said Schultz “drank, he smoked weed and he drove home. Very poor decisions.”

ACHD commissioners approved a new policy with some stipulations.

We agree with newly elected commissioner Dave McKinney, who said that he expects more issues will arise from the policy and he would prefer it be eliminated altogether.

McKinney is right. ACHD should get rid of the policy completely.

If someone is killed in a car crash, we sympathize and respect the urge to do something, to put up a makeshift memorial at the site, a temporary salve for a tragic event. If anything, ACHD should have a policy that allows, on a temporary basis, those makeshift memorials. But after a certain period, say, 15 or 30 days, the memorial must come down.

We understand the need to grieve and the desire to have some marker to remember your loved one — regardless of the circumstances.

However, that grieving process should be done privately, not via a sign put up by the Ada County Highway District.

Statesman editorials are the unsigned opinion expressing the consensus of the Idaho Statesman’s editorial board. Board members are opinion editor Scott McIntosh, editor Chadd Cripe and newsroom editors Dana Oland and Jim Keyser and community members J.J. Saldaña and Christy Perry.