It’s been 25 years since their two sons died in a high-speed traffic collision, but the pain hasn’t gone away.
Alice Renolds of Canyon Country and her husband, Tom, lost two of their three children, Timothy, 18, and Daniel, 15, on Feb. 17, 2000. The two boys were passengers in a car driven by an 18-year-old who was speeding on Soledad Canyon Road when the driver lost control of the vehicle and crashed.
“It’s hard to believe that they’ve been gone that long,” Renolds said of her sons during a recent telephone interview. “The pain of losing them is always there. It never goes away. It just softens. It softens with time. But there’s a crack in your heart. It kind of heals over and you’re able to recall the good memories that are comforting or bring a smile to your face.”
Over the years since the tragedy, Renolds and her husband have been outspoken in the community about safe driving. They regularly share their experiences with young first-time non-violent traffic offenders in the city’s Community Court program.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, they also participated in “Every 15 Minutes” programs for high school students, in which students and first responders staged drunk-driving collisions and went through the steps to show what happens when a drunk driver kills others.
Then there’s the city of Santa Clarita’s annual Walk of Remembrance at Central Park, honoring those who tragically died young in traffic-related incidents. Renolds and her husband regularly participate in the event, which serves as a reminder to the community to “Know More” about safe driving habits and to pledge for “No More” young lives lost.
The walk centers around the park’s Youth Grove, which features a monument to Santa Clarita youth, aged 24 years and younger, who perished prematurely because of drunk, reckless or distracted driving. Each youth is memorialized with a pillar shaped like a tree stump, inscribed with a plaque bearing the individual’s name.
The Renolds boys’ monuments are marked as C3 and C4. In August, Renolds and her husband, along with others, joined the city in adding two more names to the 119 youths already memorialized. Renolds closed the evening with a plea to the youth in attendance:
“To the teens in the audience, and also all drivers, please slow down,” she said. “We have lost too many in our valley.”
Renolds and her husband feel that they’re keeping the memory of their boys alive by what they do. Their story, they hope, will prevent traffic-related tragedies like the one that claimed the lives of their sons.
“We’re not preaching,” Renolds said. “We tell our story, step by step, what we went through. We start with how three teenagers came to the door that night to tell us that they saw Tim dead in the car on the street where it happened. They saw the crash scene. They saw him dead in the car.”
Renolds and her husband also share how they had to pick out two coffins and two grave sites. The idea that parents have to bury their own kids is unthinkable to so many people they speak to, and it is, she said. It’s one thing, she added, when someone loses a husband or a sister or a brother. Losing a child, however, is so different. Children are supposed to outlive their parents.
Renolds often speaks with parents and grandparents who have lost children and grandchildren. Among all the work she does in her community, she’s also co-leader of the Santa Clarita Valley Chapter of the Compassionate Friends, and she takes part in the annual Candle Light Remembrance Program, which happens on the second Sunday every December.
Parents whose children died young share an evening of music, spoken word, memories and support with family and friends, and then the people in the group illuminate candles one by one as someone, often Renolds, lists off the names of lost loved ones. A video presentation will then show pictures of those who have perished.
Parents and grandparents who have buried their children and grandchildren need something like that to attend, Renolds said, adding, “You need a place where you can cry, you can laugh, you can scream, you can yell. You’ve got to get all those feelings and those emotions out.”
In addition to what Renolds and her husband do in the various community programs, they also give scholarships at Canyon High School in the name of their sons. Renolds pointed out that that’s the school her sons attended. She and her husband also speak as part of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s VIDA (Vital Intervention and Directional Alternatives) program, which is designed to help at-risk teens between the ages of 12 and 17.
And while Renolds feels it’s important for her husband and her to share their experience, it’s extremely difficult.
“It brings up that whole night of when they (her sons) were killed,” she said. “That night, I don’t sleep much because I remember the whole incident all over again. It takes a couple days to kind of push it all back down again.”
Asked if she sees any results of their work, Renolds said she’s not sure. But she knows others helped her and her husband when they were first going through it.
“I try and tell people, you need to find a cause,” she said. “I think it helps to find a cause in your journey of grief, to find something to give you momentum, a cause to do something in memory of your child, to help you in your journey.”
But Renolds couldn’t say that she feels that the streets are safer. She still sees “crazy” drivers out there. She said these people think they’re invincible, but their vehicles are lethal weapons, especially when they’re driving that fast.
According to Santa Clarita City Traffic Engineer Joel Bareng, the city formed its Traffic Safety Committee in 2016 to address the kinds of issues that Renolds was talking about. With the committee also came city programs and public relations campaigns that address traffic safety like “Heads Up!” “Drive. Focus. Live.” and “Respect is a Two Way Street.”
Since 2016, statistics show improvement. Bareng provided the following data: Between 2016 and 2024, the collision rate has declined 35%; injury collision rate declined 18%; and collisions in the 11 hot-spot corridors (areas the city identified as problem spots based on collected statistics) declined 40% (315 to 188).
According to Capt. Justin Diez of the SCV Sheriff’s Station, numbers of local traffic-related deaths over the years have varied.
“There have been years where there were two, there’ve been years where there were four or eight,” Diez said in a recent telephone interview. “In 2012, there were 10. Then there were a couple years where there was four, six, five, eight, four. It’s kind of all over the place.”
During the COVID-19 pandemic, those numbers, for example, were down, Diez said, likely due to the fact that fewer people were on the road. He reported four traffic-related deaths in 2020 and eight in 2021. In 2022, there were three. In 2023, there were six. And in 2024, there were four.
The Sheriff’s Department takes the information it receives from the city’s traffic department to address what Bareng called the “11 hot-spot corridors.” The Sheriff’s Department then focuses attention and patrols on those areas with the goal of stopping and discouraging reckless driving behavior before it results in deadly collisions.
“Speeding is very prevalent,” Diez said. “We’ve got very large streets in Santa Clarita that almost look like miniature freeways — they’re major thoroughfares. Newhall Ranch Road, Copper Hill, Soledad, Sierra Highway, parts of Bouquet — these are major, major thoroughfares, some with four lanes in each direction. Excessive speed is obviously a contributing factor to many collisions, certainly not to exclude fatal collisions. And when those speeds are high, those collisions are really bad.”
Renolds and her husband have two teen granddaughters — one who’s 20 and one who’s 18 — and they can’t help but be fearful knowing they’re now drivers on the roads. All they can do is continue to warn them and others with their story, to fight for safer driving in the community, and to console those who have suffered as they have, all in the names of their sons whose deaths might hopefully prevent that kind of thing from happening again.
Renolds said she and her husband placed an obituary in the newspaper in honor of their two sons. They’ve also planned a gathering at 5 p.m. on the 17th of the month at the Youth Grove for anyone to come and share stories and to be together.
