Students mourn for girl hit by SUV, hope for one injured

Lindsey Marie Fesmire died after the collision on Durant Road around 3 p.m. Friday. Krista Carcaterra, 13, suffered serious injuries but was in good condition at WakeMed Saturday.

Friends created a memorial at the site where the girls were hit, not far from their school.

"I've known Lindsey forever, and she's just like gone, and you don't know what to do," her friend Patterson Ludwig said.

"It's so, so sad. I just kinda can't believe it," another friend Kristin Heyward said.

Relatives said that Lindsey and Krista had gone to a Bojangles restaurant in a shopping center across from their school after classes ended. They were headed back to school when they stepped into the westbound lanes of Durant Road.

Witnesses said the girls ran across two lanes of the four-lane road, according to the wreck report. A gold van traveling in the left eastbound lane stopped for them, and the driver of a gray SUV in the right eastbound lane braked but couldn't stop in time. The SUV struck the girls.

Police said they do not plan to file charges. The SUV driver was traveling at the legal speed limit of 35 mph, and the girls were not in a crosswalk, according to the wreck report.

A crosswalk across Durant Road is about 200 yards away from where the girls were hit. Students said they don't always use it.

Consoling the mourning students were members of the community, including Nancy Leoffler, who lost her teenage daughter in a wreck 10 years ago.

"Kids of this age have no context for how to process grief. They don't even realize, I think, what has happened," Leoffler said.

Student Brady Green said that imagining the future after the collision is hard – "just that knowing that we are going to go to school, and they are not going to be there."