Widow Questions Safety of I-485 Cable Barriers After Husband’s Deadly Accident

CHARLOTTE, NC – A Charlotte widow is raising concerns about the safety of cable barriers along I-485.

Jenniffer Vermillion’s husband Bobby died after the barriers failed to stop his car from crossing into oncoming traffic.

“My husband was an amazing man. He was an amazing father,” Vermillion says.

The father of two was heading to work around 6:45 Thursday morning when he crashed near the Harrisburg road exit.

“There was an area off the shoulder of the road that had a three-inch lip that was not paved and you could see where his tire marks went off the edge of the road,” Vermillion explains.

She says he overcorrected and it appears he went into an embankment and then under the cable barrier in the median.

“He did not pass away whenever he hit the barrier. He passed away when he was hit head on by oncoming traffic,” she says.

Vermillion says when she went to the scene, she was stunned by what she found.

“The storm drain that’s close to there had caused so much erosion, that polls that were not even near the area could be lifted by hand,” she says.

Jen Thompson with NCDOT says right now the department is still waiting for more information.

“The report’s not been made available to us yet, so we don’t know exactly what happened,” Thompson says.

Vermillion says she wants to the state to take a closer look at cable barriers, so that no one else has to go through the grief she’s suffering.

“He was my soul mate. And he was taken from me way too soon,” she says.

A GoFundMe page has been set up for the Vermillion family. Click here for more.