Treasure Coast High School Freshman Dies After Being Struck by SUV While Walking to School on Port St. Lucie Boulevard

Gregg Hollander | October 8, 2026 | Accident News

A 14-year-old Treasure Coast High School freshman was walking to school around 6 a.m. on October 7th along Southwest Port St. Lucie Boulevard, near Squirrel Avenue, when an SUV struck them from behind. That stretch of road has no sidewalks and is under construction, and police say the student was walking near the edge of the roadway beside construction barrels. The driver initially believed the vehicle had hit a barrel and didn’t realize a person had been struck, then turned around, came back, and called 911. The student died from their injuries a few days later. 

Two legal questions stand out to me here: what a driver owes a pedestrian they never saw and who else answers for a road that students walk along while it’s being rebuilt. I’m immediately questioning the state of the driver and whether there were any safe areas to walk.

A Driver’s Duty Doesn’t Depend on Seeing the Person First

Florida law is direct about this. Every driver has to use due care to avoid colliding with any pedestrian, give warning when necessary, and take proper precaution when a child is in view. That duty is about the care a driver takes, not about whether they understood in the moment what they were about to hit. It’s more important to know what the driver was looking at, how fast they were going, and whether any other driver would have reasonably made the same mistake. Coming back to the scene and calling 911 matters, but it says nothing about the seconds before impact.

A Construction Zone Adds More Questions

This road is being widened by the Florida Department of Transportation, and students walk it every morning. Florida follows the federal manual that sets traffic control standards, adopted under state law, and its work zone chapter says that when a work zone affects people on foot, adequate pedestrian access has to be provided. It also recommends rerouting pedestrians or installing barriers where there’s a significant chance of vehicles entering their path. What was actually in place for people on foot here hasn’t been publicly explained, and nothing reported so far says the standard wasn’t met. However, it’s simply a fair question to ask about any work zone where children walk to school, especially in this situation.

Who could be answerable matters as well. A claim against a state agency is allowed, but it’s capped at $200,000 per person and $300,000 per incident, and a written notice has to be filed first, which in a wrongful death case means notice to the Department of Financial Services within two years. A private company hired to build the road isn’t treated the same way: the same statute extends the state’s protections to certain inspection firms, but expressly not to a firm hired to design or build the road. That’s the kind of detail that decides how much a family can actually recover, and it only matters if the facts end up pointing there.