It's nearly 2 am on June 26, 2023, and Sakeleanna Adame is in her 2020 Highlander blasting 45 miles an hour for the intersection of Bowdish Road and 16th Avenue in Spokane Valley. Buttons with photos of Bryce — her firstborn son — are pinned to her chest.
She knows the speed limit is 35. She knows there’s a stop sign peeking out from behind the utility pole. She ignores both.
She’s angry, she’s broken, she wants to understand what happened, she wants to feel what her son experienced in his final moments. She wants to know. She has to know.
Then she hits the patch of road where Bryce went off the road a year earlier. Bam. The bottom of the front end of her Highlander — an SUV designed to withstand rough roads — slams against the “Bowdish bump,” a slope in the asphalt that neighbors say has caused a slew of serious accidents since 2014.
In that moment, she’s certain: The street itself killed her son.
Multiple factors conspired to kill Bryce Prince Adame. His friend in the driver’s seat — a teen with a history of reckless driving, who’d been smoking weed earlier that day. A dark January night made darker by the freezing fog. A wide road free of sidewalks that goaded cars to drive faster. The stop sign often obscured by a utility pole and tree foliage.
And the Bowdish bump.
The Kia that Bryce had been riding in on January 23, 2022, was much lighter than Sakeleanna Adame’s Highlander. The tires were small, and the bottom of the car’s body was closer to the ground.
It’s unclear how fast the Kia was going, but it was fast enough that the bump sent it into an uncontrollable spin — across the road nearly 100 yards, rolling over large landscape boulders in a nearby lawn, then crunching into a pine tree. Bryce was in the back seat, his head pinned by the mangled metal of the crushed roof. Cops had to wait for the firefighters to extract him from the wreck.
Adame remembers her son’s final moments in the hospital, his hair slicked back with his blood, black stitches gashing across his “beautiful face.” She held his hand and felt the warmth drain from his body.
In 2023, Adame filed a lawsuit against the driver — her son’s friend — but also with Spokane County and the city of Spokane Valley for failing to fix the intersection.
The public often debates over traffic tragedies through the lens of personal responsibility — blaming bad drivers, drunk drivers and stupid drivers for road fatalities. But there’s another angle: one that also directs blame at engineers and politicians — the people who allow dangerous roads to fester. While Spokane Valley leaders have long touted the city’s ability to run a lean government, it has often struggled to fund street projects to fix or improve roads.
Bryce wasn’t the first victim of the Bowdish and 16th intersection. By Spokane Valley’s own count, there were 55 accidents at or directly near that intersection between 2010 and 2021.
In a deposition for Adame’s lawsuit, Spokane Valley Traffic Engineering Program Manager Jerremy Clark acknowledged that no other intersection he’d ever analyzed in Spokane Valley had a higher crash rate. Yet Spokane Valley’s attorneys have argued that the Bowdish bump was “unremarkable” and that, because the most serious accidents involved speed or intoxication, the drivers bore the blame. They pointed to the “stop ahead” sign meant to alert drivers a stop was coming up.
But Adame’s expert, safety engineering consultant Steven Wiker, argued in court documents that if a driver failed to stop at the stop sign, a Kia going just five miles over the speed limit could be launched. And because the stop sign was partly hidden behind a utility pole — obscured by “defective placement” — many drivers missed it.
Adame said the real target of the lawsuit wasn’t her son’s friend. She can forgive him. Teens do stupid and dangerous things. Her deeper anger is with the city of Spokane Valley. Neighbors had complained about the intersection for a decade before it was finally renovated in 2024 — and it wasn’t even the first time an intersection in the Valley has killed speeding teenagers by launching them into a tree.
“They knew, and they're adults,” Adame said. “They knew … They failed me. They failed my son. They failed my community.”
ROAD TOLLS
Amid the litigation, the city of Spokane Valley was reticent to comment at length to RANGE’s questions, other than providing a link detailing the city’s work on the intersection since 2024.
But former-Spokane Valley City Council Member Arne Woodard said the city of Spokane Valley has been sued over these kinds of accidents more than once. Typically, the driver was speeding and intoxicated.
“Sometimes, as a government, we look like we’re the big bad wolf because we refuse to pay for other people's poor judgment or lack of discipline,” Woodard said. “They want us to pay out millions of millions of millions of taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars that have come into us, frugally.”
Frugality was embedded in Spokane Valley’s origin: The city was formed in 2003, partly as a way to keep taxes low. But as the population began to rapidly grow, the Valley found that many of the roads inherited from the county weren’t cutting it anymore.
"You don't even want to know how many intersections in the valley are in dire need of drastic improvements," Woodard said.
But the chosen funding stream for road maintenance — landline telephone taxes — dwindled as the landlines did.
In 2018, the Spokesman-Review reported that the Valley’s then-Deputy City Manager John Hohman said the Valley had a "reactive pavement management program,” driven by fixing the worst-of-the-worst problems instead of planning ahead. To upgrade arterial roads like Bowdish, they frequently had to rely on state and federal grants.
But grants come with red tape and additional delays.
“Arterials are grantable,” Woodard said, “but you have to prioritize all your projects, and get them included in the transportation master plan of the area, and then it goes to the state, and the state has to approve it, blah, blah, blah, blah…”
Even when the council found extra funding for street maintenance, it didn’t mean the funding would stay found. In 2023, Woodard successfully convinced Spokane Valley to pass a $20 car tab fee to pay for better roads — only for the council to turn around the next year and raid the street projects fund in order to pay for more sheriff’s deputies.
Bad roads, he pointed out, mean cops and firefighters will spend a lot more time responding to collisions.
“I'm all for law enforcement, but law enforcement doesn't necessarily trump infrastructure,” Woodard said.
THERE GOES THE NEIGHBORHOOD
Neighbors near the Bowdish and 16th intersection have felt the impact of bad road design hit home. Repeatedly.
Mary Lou Peck, who lives just past the intersection on Bowdish, recalled how, in February 2014, a speeding woman trying to outrun police lost control, crashed into a truck and veered into the corner of her house, smashing through brick and drywall.
Three months later, another driver died after hitting the same spot and plowing into a tree in her yard. Former Airway Heights firefighter Garth Werner, a light sleeper, was the first neighbor at the accident scene, as usual. The car was still running. Werner reached into the car, turned off the ignition, and then looked to see if the driver could be saved.
“I checked his carotid,” Werner said. “He was pulseless.”
The driver, Esteban Alejandro Apodaca, a 34-year-old father, was dead.
After Apodaca’s death, Werner wrote in an affidavit for Adame’s suit, he had "talked to a Valley City Councilman, City firefighters and police” about the problems with the intersection.
"Everybody, including the city of Spokane Valley, knew about this problem on Bowdish Road, but most people were scared to talk about it,” he wrote.
In 2017, after twins Gordon and Marcus Hill hit the Bowdish bump and crashed into a tree near the Peck’s house, neighbors appeared on a KXLY news broadcast calling for the city to take action. It wasn’t a new issue for neighbors.
On Spokane News, a community Facebook page that shares police scanner traffic, the phrase “Bowdish and 16th, Vehicle Collision Reported” cropped up like a mantra for years.
Commenters called the intersection “notorious,” the "worst four-way stop in the Valley," and complained about people missing the stop sign. They repeatedly called for a light, a roundabout — something — to fix it.
Records obtained by RANGE through a request to Spokane Valley show citizens in 2019 and 2020 officially asking about installing traffic lights or a roundabout at the intersection to deal with the high number of car crashes at the intersection. Instead, Valley staff trimmed a tree and tweaked the size of the stop signs, but nothing more.
Meanwhile, neighbors took their own defensive measures. Peck said her next-door neighbor’s insurance company required him to put in large boulders in front of his house to shield against future runaway cars. These were the rocks hit by the Kia in 2022, in the accident that killed Bryce.
Days after Bryce’s death, neighbors showed up in force at the Spokane Valley City Council meeting to, once again, plead for something to be done.
“It’s very, very horrific right now,” Werner told the council.
He explained in detail how drunk or reckless drivers would miss the stop sign, and the bump would send drivers careening into houses. University High School students were holding candlelight vigils in the Pecks’ yard, and Werner worried that the kids could be hit if there was yet another runaway car.
“Grind down the incline. … Put in a light. Put in a roundabout. Something,” Werner urged. “With the growth of the valley right now … traffic is getting worse and worse and worse, and we’re going to have more and more of these incidents happening.”
As if to emphasize his point, there was another collision at the intersection two weeks later, and another six weeks after that.
Neighborhood concerns hadn’t been entirely ignored. Woodard said the city has discussed improving Bowdish since 2016.
By 2020, a vague attempt at making Bowdish safer was made official: the city included adding sidewalks from Ninth Avenue to 16th in its six-year plan, with the potential for a traffic light or a roundabout. Sidewalks are not only safer for pedestrians — they also slow down drivers by making roads seem narrower. But all that needed funding. The city applied for a Safe Routes to School grant from the state of Washington in 2020.
It took two years before Spokane Valley was awarded the money, and another two years for construction on the roundabout to begin.
Pressed by Adame’s attorney in a deposition, city staffers presented a checklist they needed to run through before construction could begin: council funding approval, design schematics, a topographic survey to map out the property and right-of-way access approvals.
The city completed the roundabout at 16th Avenue in October 2024 — more than 10 years after Apodaca’s death and more than two years after Bryce’s.
Even then, the roundabout was prone to low-speed fender benders, triggering another renovation of the intersection in 2025.
But Adame sees the problem with Spokane Valley’s approach to road safety as much broader than just one bad intersection.
“Look at the ‘Ponderosa jump,” she said. “They knew that was a problem too, and they didn't fix that."
DOOMED TO REPEAT IT
Take a six-minute drive south from Bowdish and 16th, and you’ll come to the intersection of Bates Road and Ponderosa Drive, where another version of this story played out a decade earlier: A dangerous road with a bad reputation. Frustrated neighbors. Lack of city action. Reckless U-High students killed in an auto accident. A lawsuit from grieving parents.
In that case, the road was called the “Ponderosa jump,” a dip in the road that allowed daredevils to get some air if they drove fast enough. Two 15-year-old passengers, Josie Freier and McKenzie Mott — died in 2013 after their car went off the jump at 70 miles an hour and hit a tree.
Nearby neighbors like Tom Towey and his wife had been complaining about the reckless drivers on the road for years, but nothing had been done — despite the fact that Towey was the mayor of Spokane Valley at the time.
After those two deaths, however, it only took one week of a road closure, a bit of asphalt and $25,000 to put in a fix.
The price of not improving such dangerous pieces of infrastructure can be much higher. In 2015, Freier’s and Mott’s parents sued the driver, Spokane County and Spokane Valley. After nearly two years battling in court, the suit was settled for an undisclosed amount.
The night of Bryce’s death, Werner said, he called local firefighter Rick Freier to make sure he wasn’t going to be the one responding to the car crash. He didn’t want to put Freier through it. Freier’s daughter had died the same way as Bryce.
In an interview with RANGE, Freier resisted simple apportionments of blame. A city can’t cover everything in “bubble wrap,” Freier told RANGE, but it can save lives by intervening in the right place.
“Don't ignore the warnings,” he said. “If you've got a particular area that causes problems ... it could be just a minor thing here, a minor thing there, and then all of a sudden it's not a minor thing anymore.”
ASPHALT AND TEARS
Freier and his wife met with Adame after her son was killed. What they talked about is too personal to share, Freier said, but there is a grim understanding that can be shared between two families who experienced the same kind of nightmare.
"We're part of the same awful club,” he said. “You reach out and try to find someone that survived and ask them how.”
When grief is deep enough, it eats at your body as well as your mind. Adame dropped to 104 pounds. She couldn’t work, so her family had to dip into their 401k. She slept in her son's room for three months. Years have passed, and she still doesn’t want to go through the dirty clothes in his hamper — she knows his smell lingers in the threads of his sweaters.
She’s memorialized her son in countless ways.
Adame hung the initials LLB — Long Live Bryce — on a silver necklace draped around her neck and pressed them in a decal onto her front windshield. She planted a limelight hydrangea at his gravesite, sprinkled with his ashes.
When the tree Bryce collided with was removed after the city began rehabbing the street, she asked Werner to cut out a vertical chunk of the trunk with his chainsaw. For a long time, she didn’t understand why she wanted it. Finally, she got it: She wanted it because it was the last place her son was alive.
That piece sits in a secret garden in her house, surrounded by tealights.
“The pain is so deep, you can't reason with it until it hits you,” she said.
The beauty of Bryce’s life is forever enmeshed with the tragedy of his death — the way the glass from the Kia remains embedded in the wood of the tree trunk.
Today, Adame stands at the intersection of Bowdish and 16th, tears gliding down her cheeks. She avoided this place for a long time, taking the long way around to drive her daughter to middle school.
The Bowdish bump is gone. The intersection has been fully transformed by a dozen traffic calming measures: sidewalks, bright neon yellow pedestrian signs, yield signs with blinking red lights, clear crosswalks and a massive roundabout.
In its own way, this far-safer intersection stands as another physical memorial to Adame’s son. Maybe Bryce’s death, despite the cruelty of it all, means others will live. Maybe that is a part of his legacy.
“I want a sign there, in memory of Bryce, so everybody knows his story,” Adame said.
“Going forward, maybe now no one else will have to go through what my family and my community has gone through.”
But for her son?
“They were too late, you know?” she said. “They were too late.”
