STARKVILLE — Susan McAllister got the call no mother wants to answer.

It was Dec. 27, 2010, mid-afternoon and the McAllister family was still reveling in another Christmas spent together.

Just after 3 p.m., joy turned to heartache when the McAllisters learned their youngest son, Wynn, had died in a two-vehicle car accident in Oktibbeha County.

Floored by the news, McAllister tried to balance the sorrow by understanding that accidents happen. But after visiting the crash site at the intersection of Highway 25 and Longview Road, McAllister fought back anger.

“He didn’t have to die,” McAllister said. “The road he was traveling was dangerous. There was no way he could have known that stop sign and a major highway was there.”

Wynn McAllister was driving his Toyota Camry on Longview Road toward the intersection with Highway 25, where the speed limit is 65. McAllister overshot the intersection and was hit by a Toyota 4Runner. He was pronounced dead that scene from multi-system trauma.

Susan McAllister immediately started her yearlong fight to make Longview Road safer, imploring the Oktibbeha County Board of Supervisors to increase warning signage and make it easier to read during an August board meeting.

The board, though, had sufficient signage on the road according to Mississippi Department of Transportation regulations. Their signage, which included a stop sign at the intersection and a sign warning of the stop sign, was an “optical illusion” because of how tall the warning sign is and the distance between it and the stop sign.

“If you’re not familiar with that road and you on there, the illusion is that you’re going up a hill and there is no four-lane,” McAllister said. “It’s frightening.”

Mike Tagert, Mississippi Transportation Commissioner for North Mississippi, said MDOT did an engineering study of the intersection in the summer. MDOT did traffic counts to look at crossover traffic rates, and relative to a four-lane highway the numbers were low.

MDOT, responsible for Highway 25 signage, placed dangerous intersection signs at the five-second mark to slow traffic through the intersection.

“We looked at stoplight options, at traffic counts, the accidents — not just the number but how they occur,” Tagert said. “The vast majority are driver error, not related to the line of sight or construction of intersection. But from time to time, you have to review each intersection to see if there’s a way you can make things safer.”

MDOT isn’t responsible for Longview Road and Poorhouse Road, which begins on the other side of the intersection. The county must add its own signage or rumble strips, which it did at the intersection of Poorhouse Road and South Montgomery. There, the county used High Risk Rural Road federal funds to add a a new traffic signal, road striping and signage.

McAllister was hopeful the same kind of signal and signage would be placed at the Longview Road/Highway 25 intersection, but it had been nearly 10 months since Wynn’s death.

In that span, another accident, eerily similar to Wynn’s wreck happened at the intersection.

In June, John B. Bush, 62, was westbound on Longview Road at the intersection of Highway 25 when he failed to yield the right of way and was struck by Jimmy Pannell, 66, of Columbus, at approximately 1 p.m. Bush died as a result of his injuries.

The two accidents are the only fatal crashes at the intersection since January 2006. However, there have been 26 accidents at the intersection in that span, according to crash statistics provided by MDOT.

“Mrs. Bush, she told me not too long before her husband was killed that she ran out into traffic on the road,” McAllister said. “It’s bad enough in the daytime, but at night you’re helpless.”

Frustrated by the pace at which the county moved to make improvements to Longview Road, McAllister turned to friend Dick Hall, MDOT transportation commissioner for the central district.

Hall helped facilitate the placement of larger stop signs and speed strips on the road. While McAllister would like a four-way stop at the intersection, she’s relieved that the road will be safer. McAllister said the county plans to lower the speed limit from 65. A new speed limit hasn’t been determined.

“I can’t tell you the relief it gives us that some other family won’t experience what we did,” McAllister said. “With as many college students and young people in that town, to know we’ve brought life to this, it’s huge to us.”