Slow down, drivers. People are dying.
Dia Lee, a beloved employee at Uncle Bobbie's, was run down while leaving work. Days later, Elizabeth Negron died at the same intersection, Germantown and Coulter. This has to stop.
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On June 20, a 21-year-old named Dia Lee left work at Uncle Bobbie’s Coffee & Books and was killed while crossing Germantown Avenue.
I didn’t know Lee, a student at Johns Hopkins University with a bright light and beautiful spirit. But it’ll be a long time before I forget the details around how their life ended.
Lee was killed when a speeding Tesla struck them and then drove away. Days later, the alleged driver, Quadera Parrish, turned herself in to police. But the damage had been done. A bright light that had spread joy and kindness to so many had been extinguished.
“Dia was not only the best high school student that we hired, Dia was probably the best employee we had, period, in terms of consistency, work ethic, of quality of work, character, fit in terms of the culture of Uncle Bobbie’s,” Marc Lamont Hill, who owns Uncle Bobbie’s, told me. “Dia was just special.”
As he spoke about his former employee, Hill’s voice broke with emotion. Like many of those who knew and loved Lee, he’s still going through it.
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But — blessedly — even after so much tragedy and darkness, comes light.
A tree dedication in Lee’s memory is scheduled for Nov. 18 at 9:30 a.m. at Germantown and Coulter streets, near where they were killed. Years from now, the sad memory of what happened to Lee that awful day will be joined by a tall, sturdy tree with branches reaching toward the heavens.
Friends and relatives also hope to establish an endowed scholarship, as well as some sort of permanent memorial, on Johns Hopkins’ campus in Baltimore. Former NBC10 anchor Renee Chenault Fattah — who graduated from Johns Hopkins and is a school trustee — is among those helping to make it happen.
“I was just really touched by the fact that this was a person who had always wanted to go to Hopkins. And to have lost their life like this — it just touched me,” Chenault Fattah told me last week. The scholarship and memorial are “a way to try and have something good come out of something that was just a horrible situation.”
Traffic fatalities increased nationwide during COVID-19. Shortly after Lee was hit, 32-year-old Elizabeth Negron was struck and killed near the same intersection, at Germantown and Coulter.
“Whenever there is an open road, people instinctively drive faster,” Capt. Mark Overwise, commander of the Philadelphia Police’s Accident Investigation District, told me, noting that traffic fatalities are up citywide, not just in Germantown. “I think that the pandemic made things worse because there was less traffic.”
Traffic fatalities are up citywide, not just in Germantown.
In response, neighborhood residents recently formed the Germantown Traffic Safety Coalition. They also spent $2,500 on about 400 signs with messages that say “Slow Down Germantown” and “Slow Down, Save Lives,” placing them around the neighborhood as a first step toward calming traffic patterns.
“If we can get people to just slow down, that’s really the biggest key before we get to cameras or anything else. We have to police ourselves,” Sharrieff Ali, a group cochair told me. “It’s about citizens and government working together.”
Janise Lee, Lee’s mother, took Dia Lee to Uncle Bobbie’s a few days after it opened back in 2017 and inquired about a job for the teenager. Hill hired Dia, then a student at his alma mater, Carver Engineering and Science High School, on the spot.
Lee quickly became the heart and soul of the operation, which is equal parts coffee shop, bookstore, and community gathering space, working weekends at first and during summers, then later on breaks from Johns Hopkins.
“There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t still cry,” Janise told me. “I’m going to miss my child forever.”
She’s haunted by the way her child died.
“It was just so sudden,” Janise said. “Dia had crossed that street a thousand times going to school or work. We’re two blocks from where it happened. They were just trying to get home and that’s the part that doesn’t make sense and you can’t make sense of.”
The speeding in their neighborhood is “ridiculous,” she added. “They call it the Germantown Expressway.”
Hopefully drivers will heed the new signs and reduce their speed. Out of so much darkness, there really needs to be light.
All of this is too late for Dia Lee and Elizabeth Negron, but hopefully the efforts will save others. In the meantime, to all the drivers out there — slow down.