A juvenile court's unusual punishment for some Georgia students caught jaywalking has some people talking.
The intersection of Old Atlanta and Nichols roads in Forsyth County is jammed with cars. The highway is adjacent to Lambert High School. There's a crosswalk about 50 yards up the street, but kids cut through a path and jaywalk across the five-lane road as a shortcut to get to a subdivision across the street.
“In the afternoons, traffic picks up, and it’s not safe for the kids to be crossing,” said Forsyth County Sheriff Sgt. Rob Heagerty.
He said school resource officers and sheriff’s deputies warned kids for more than a month not to jaywalk. If they continued, he said, they were told they'd get a citation.
The jaywalking didn’t stop.
The county juvenile court now has ordered the kids to pay a fine, visit a funeral home and write their own obituaries to give to their parents in hopes of letting the risks sink in.
“They think they are invincible, and they don’t realize the speed of the cars coming,” Heagerty said.
The staff of a funeral home is working with the juvenile court.
“Think we have 17 that are coming through that are jaywalkers,” said Rick Wiggins of McDonald and Sons Funeral Home.
WSB-TV's Diana Davis talked to one of the children's parents. He wouldn't go on camera, but he told her he does not think there were enough warnings. He said the school should have had an assembly.
The Sheriff’s Office said the court-ordered funeral home trip is not intended as harassment.
“It just got to the point where citations were the only route we could go,” Heagerty said.
The crosswalk has a button to make it easier for kids to cross, but the parent Davis talked to said this crosswalk alone isn't enough. He said there should be more down the road – not only for the high school, but also for the elementary school.
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