By Rossy Soto, Jasmin Dinh and Jeff Plungis
In 2022, Justice High School junior Lesly Diaz-Bonilla was struck and killed as she was leaving the Barcroft View Apartments, on her way to school. Just four years earlier, in the same Fairfax County location, a mother and daughter were injured by a hit-and-run driver.
Diaz-Bonilla’s death drew attention to a safety problem that continues to plague a 4-mile stretch of Columbia Pike between Bailey’s Crossroads and Annandale, where poor design and inattentive drivers often put pedestrians at risk.
There are proven, low-cost countermeasures that could improve safety, but they haven’t been implemented, despite growing pressure from neighbors who live around the roadway.
Stretching from Arlington National Cemetery to Annandale, just inside the Capital Beltway (I-495), Columbia Pike is an arterial road designed by traffic engineers to move high volumes of traffic as quickly as possible. As Fairfax County’s population has grown, more residents have put down roots along a busy road that wasn’t made for walking.
“It is the wild wild west, that corner,” said Victoria Sneed, a Justice High parent who served on a working group looking to improve the safety of teens walking to school after Diaz-Bonilla’s death. “In my opinion it is incredibly poorly designed and not respected by traffic.”
Sneed’s working group delivered a comprehensive report to the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors and the Fairfax County School Board in January 2025, after more than two years of study.
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