Parents of traffic victim frustrated

In the year since her daughter was killed, "All that's been accomplished is a lot of talk," Marlene Fifield said.

She and her husband, Paul, are committed to improving safety at the Stillwater Road/West Reserve Drive intersection where their daughter, Allison, died when a dump-truck driver ran a stop sign.

"This is my crusade," Marlene said.

"Last summer, I would sit out at the intersection with a cell phone and I would call people."

The people she called were the drivers and employers of drivers who run through the stop signs on Stillwater Road. Mostly, she used the company names and phone numbers printed on the sides of the trucks.

She called one driver and said, "You just ran through a stop sign."

He said, "Give me a break, lady. Don't you have anything better to do with your time?"

She really doesn't.

Another number rang through to a careless driver's home phone, where a teenage girl answered Marlene's call. The girl might have been about Allison's age.

Allison was 16 when she died.

The comic strips she had stuck on her bedroom door are still there. College recruitment letters still come for the promising young student. Instead of helping Allison choose a university, though, the Fifields are designing a beautiful headstone with a three-dimensional ice skate, commemorating something she loved to do.

"We don't want any parents to go through what we did," Paul said.

So they're campaigning for a four-way stop at the intersection and a reduced speed limit on West Reserve Drive.

They would like to see legislation adopted that would require truck drivers to prove they've had a federally required safety inspection before their trucks are registered or insured in Montana.

That wouldn't have saved their daughter. There is no evidence that the driver who plowed into her Subaru ever hit his brakes, they said. But the brakes on his truck were defective and he couldn't have stopped his loaded truck quickly if he had tried, they said.

And they want drivers - all drivers - to think about what they're doing when they are on the road.

"Stop means stop. It doesn't mean slow down and look," Paul Fifield said. Drivers squeeze through red lights. They're distracted. They're dangerous.

"The violations are flagrant and constant in this valley. It infuriates me," he said.

He'd like to put up a billboard where Allison died. It would picture a driver with words of how a moment can change some people's lives. And it would picture Allison with words about how a moment can cost some people their lives.

"Ali's gone. We can't change that," Marlene said.

The couple wants people to remember how that happened.

They tend a memorial on the road where she died. Paul waters a rose bush planted there. The family spends some time there on birthdays and anniversaries. And they see from behind the cross and flowers other drivers who heedlessly blow through the stop sign.

"We'll never know what effect our efforts will have," Paul said.

He knows one thing, though.

"We can't give up."