CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Four years after a street racing crash left three people dead, the families of the victims are headed back to court to try and make a developer pay for what they lost.
The trial is set to start Monday in Mecklenburg County Court in a lawsuit that followed the collision on Highway 49 in southwest Charlotte in April 2009.
In their lawsuit, the families of Cynthia and Mcallister Furr and Hunter Holt said the company that developed the Palisades neighborhood off Highway 49 in 2001, Crescent Resources, had agreed to eventually pay for a light when traffic at the intersection got heavy enough to warrant one.
They say that beginning in May 2008, 11 months before the crash, the city of Charlotte's Department of Transportation notified Crescent it was time for a traffic signal.
In the following months the lawsuit states the North Carolina and Charlotte DOT's repeatedly asked Crescent to pay for the traffic signal, but they never did.
They said it's critical because even though Tyler Stasko and Carlene Atkinson had been going more than 80 mph in the street race that started on Carowinds Boulevard, they had stopped for every other red light along the way.
In their answer, Crescent Resources denies most of what the families are claiming.
Most importantly, they say the city didn't even do the study showing a stoplight was warranted here.
Their answer also said that if anyone was negligent, it was the people involved in the accident.
They said Tyler Stasko and Carlene Atkinson were racing and clearly knew that was dangerous. They also say that Cynthia Furr had pulled out onto Highway 49 without property looking and turned into the path of the oncoming cars.