Months later, Sherry Leek's daughter, Kassandra, was killed instantly in a head-on car crash on U.S. Highway 17. The name of the young man whose vehicle collided with her daughter's haunted her. Sherry Leek knew she had seen his name, David Cooper Gasque, somewhere before.

Then she remembered the blue-eyed surveyor who had come to work one day on their property. He also died in the crash.

The stakes no longer serve a purpose -- the house is built -- but they will not be removed.

"I can't take them out," Sherry Leek said Monday. "I'll probably just landscape around them."

Gasque, referred to as Cooper by those close to him, and Kassandra Leek are among the 12 people killed and 103 injured since September 2002 on a strip of U.S. 17 between Jacksonboro and Gardens Corner just south of Charleston County, according to the state Department of Public Safety. Their parents join a growing group of government, environmental and nonprofit agencies determined to stop the death toll.

State Highway Commissioner Bob Harrell said a couple of meetings have occurred in the past month among members of the DOT, property owners along the road and members of the Open Land Trust. He said he is confident that the $200 million needed for the project will be found once plans to widen the road to improve its safety are finalized.

"The show of support is one of the nicest things I've seen in a long time," Harrell said. "Groups that are usually at odds with the DOT are working with us on this project."

He said the road's poor safety record is the reason for the cooperation.

"We're determined that if we can get the permits, we can get it built," he said. Because the road runs through the environmentally-sensitive ACE Basin, permits must be issued from the state Department of Health and Environmental Control and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Monday night, Beaufort County Council passed a resolution in support of the parents' efforts to make the highway safer. That action followed the council's allocation last month of $5 million to help widen the road.

Efforts have been made in the past 15 years to turn the deadly strip of highway from a two-lane to a four-lane road as it runs through portions of Beaufort and Colleton counties.

Permits and money have twice held up the project in the mid-1990s. The DOT was able to expand three, two-mile sections of the highway to four lanes in the late 1990s, but the Gasque and Leek families are among the growing group of people who said this is far from enough. The two-lane highway, void of paved shoulders, leaves little room for driver error.

Cooper Gasque's father, David Gasque, said he is realistic and understands the permitting process can take awhile, but he said that construction should be under way to improve the road in three years.

"If we can keep one more parent from feeling this pain, our efforts will be worth it," said his wife Dana Gasque.

They lament the passing of their son, a Citadel student, especially before he received his class ring and had a chance to hold a child of his own in his arms someday.

"I always used to tell him, 'You will never know how much we loved you until you hold your own child in your arms and truly understand a parent's love,' " David Gasque said.

Kassandra, a junior at the College of Charleston, hoped to become engaged this summer.

"I'll never be able to share the joys of motherhood with her," said her mother Sherry Leek.

David Gasque emphasized that the highway's deadly history is far from a Beaufort County problem.

"I don't think that parents in Berkeley and Dorchester counties realize that their children are all traveling this road," he said.

He pointed to the large number of sporting events that pit tri-county sports teams against the three Beaufort County high schools.

Last month, after three sailors were killed and 71 others were injured on the road, state highway commissioners agreed to fast-track the project to widen the road.

"All we could think about when we heard about that accident were the other moms," Dana Gasque said. "Those kids didn't have to die."

Her husband takes some comfort, though, in the fact that Cooper will never experience the sense of loss that weighs so heavy on him and his wife.

"It is through the grace of God that he didn't make it," said David Gasque. "He could never have lived with himself if he knew he had hurt someone else."

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