Repeating wrecks leads homeowner to ask for help
BATON ROUGE - Imagine waking up to a car driving through your front yard; for one family, that’s happened more than once.
Wesley Wilkinson says he’s lived at his house on Joor Road since 2021. In three years, multiple cars have drifted into his yard. Wilkinson says drivers going too fast end up hitting vehicles in his driveway, and he says another car almost hit his house.
Security video shows a black car driving through Wilkinson's yard, across his driveway and hitting Wilkinson’s work truck, spinning out of control. The utility truck has been totaled twice by other drivers.
“[Had the] utility truck not been parked in the driveway, it would have come through the house,” Wilkinson said.
As a last-ditch effort, Wilkinson reached out to his Metro Council member Darryl Hurst, who connected him with the Department of Transportation and Development, and their crash reports tell a story.
Crash reports show eleven accidents have happened near the property in the past four years. Once the driver was reported to have fallen asleep, twice the crash summary shows the drivers were intoxicated.
Wilkinson says as a result, he would like to see a guardrail put up in front of his home, but DOTD reached back out saying a guardrail wouldn’t be possible.
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WBRZ also reached out to DOTD, and as they explained, guardrails are typically installed on bridges and at sudden changes in the road. They aren’t intended to protect against irresponsible drivers. Monitoring drivers falls on State Police, but Wilkinson says that's where he ran into another roadblock.
"There's really nothing they can do about it, this is a known drag strip - they try and stop them when they can of course,” Wilkinson said. “But other than that, it's really up to us to go to these measures to get things done."