A Bucks County woman fought to have a sidewalk built where her son died in a hit-and-run. It’s finally happening.

They told her it couldn’t be done.

Sharon Rearick encountered one roadblock after another when she tried to get a sidewalk installed along the stretch of New Falls Road in Bristol Township where her 23-year-old son was killed by a hit-and-run driver on a summer night in 2012.

But she pushed on, determined to spare another family the heartache that had befallen hers.

Rearick, 59, made hundreds of phone calls and sent scores of emails, highlighting her cause, and in the end, she accomplished her goal.

On Thursday, the state Department of Transportation will cut the ribbon on a sidewalk that, had it been there on that night more than a decade ago, she believes might have saved her son’s life.

Looking back on her yearslong quest, Rearick is grateful for the outcome, which she sees, in part, as a tribute to her son.

“I had to find someplace to put my grief,” Rearick said in a recent interview at her home in Bristol. “I just didn’t shut up. I kept at it. I did what I had to do to make it better.”

» READ MORE: From 2012: "Bristol Twp. man surrenders in fatal hit-and-run"

In July 2012, John “JJ” Rearick left McStew’s, an Irish pub near his home in Levittown and began the short walk home. That path took him along busy New Falls Road, where there were no sidewalks, and he walked an arm’s-length from cars speeding by.

Near the intersection of New Falls and Route 413, he was struck by a red Cadillac. In video surveillance recorded at a nearby auto body shop, the driver, Jonathan Simmons, is seen briefly slowing down and then driving off.

John Rearick lay in a coma at St. Mary Medical Center in Langhorne for six days before his parents made the difficult decision to take him off life support after the doctors said he would not recover.

“You never get over it, losing someone like that, but you learn to live with it,” his father, James Rearick said. “You just have to live around it.”

Simmons surrendered to police two weeks later and pleaded guilty to causing an accident involving death or injury and was sentenced to 15-to-30 months in state prison, followed by a year of probation. He didn’t respond to requests for comment for this story.

After burying her son, Sharon Rearick knew one thing: No other mother should have to experience the loss that she felt. Installing a sidewalk along that stretch of New Falls Road, which divides Bristol and Middletown Townships, became an all-consuming goal.

“If you really believe in something, you just can’t give up,” she said. “There were so many times it was like, ‘Why am I doing this?’ My family was getting really frustrated with me, because this is all I would do. Even at work, I’d be looking up stuff on PennDOT.”

Rearick emailed township officials, who told her that New Falls was a state-owned road under the jurisdiction of PennDOT. Her messages to PennDOT officials were met with suggestions that she consult with her local officials first, since they were responsible for maintaining sidewalks.

Middletown Township’s public safety director warned Rearick in an email that her goal would be difficult to achieve.

“I feel it’s my duty to inform you that construction of a sidewalk on New Falls Road would not be an easy or fast fight,” he wrote.

The back-and-forth was discouraging, she said, but it didn’t slow her down. She formed a nonprofit called Sidewalks Are For Everyone, or SAFE , and held regular fundraisers.

She enlisted help from State Sen. Robert Tomlinson and State Rep. Tina Davis, and in the fall of 2012, PennDOT conducted a traffic study of New Falls Road. In the five years before John Rearick’s death, the study found, there had been 18 crashes involving pedestrians on the six-mile road, four of them fatal.

Rearick’s efforts gained momentum as an online petition swelled to thousands of signatures and more and more people joined her cause.

“It wasn’t just me,” she said. “It may have started out that way, but there were a lot of other people that got hurt on that road, or knew people who got hurt on the road, and they jumped on the bandwagon.”

Finally, in 2016, Middletown and Bristol Township officials passed measures approving the sidewalk project, and PennDOT agreed to pay the $1.6 million cost.

Local officials credit Rearick for making it happen.

“We’ve never had a resident go bat for something like this, on this scale,” Bristol Township Council President Craig Bowen said in a recent interview. “It’s amazing, really amazing, that one person could make this happen. She had the energy, and she got the politicians together.”

PennDOT officials said it was unusual for the department to undertake a standalone sidewalk project. But Rearick’s advocacy persuaded the department to examine the safety of that stretch of New Falls Road, according to Ashwin Patel, senior manager for traffic engineering and safety division, for PennDOT’s District 6.

“Based on the crash data that we had along the corridor, we thought it was a good safety improvement, since we had a need that needed to be addressed,” Patel said.

Once the project was approved, it took seven years to negotiate nearly 40 easements with property owners of adjacent land and complete construction, Patel said.

Rearick says she’s grateful that all of her work is finally paying off. And she hopes the safety of a sidewalk will spare others.

“This may have started with me as a grieving mother trying to find something to make me feel better,” she said. “But, ultimately everybody helped make it happen.”