Thousands of plant workers-many car-pooling in leased vans provided to workers by Arizona Public Service Company-use the narrow road each day.īut school buses also trundle the roadway loading and unloading children, and often the school-bus routes overlap with the plant's three shift changes. The two-lane blacktop serves as the main conduit from Interstate 10 south to the nuclear plant.

In Tiffany's memory, Hilliard has planted a white cross at the roadside near where she was killed and launched what he characterizes as a one-man war to bring law back to Wintersburg Road. Her mother and I lived together for about six and a half years and she called me `Daddy' the whole time, even after we had separated,' he says. The driver's case awaits resolution, but Hilliard is bent on holding more than one man accountable for what happened.Īlthough Tiffany was not his daughter, Hilliard viewed her as such. He probably would have made it at the rate he was driving.' It was 6:58 when she was hit,' Hilliard says. Tiffany Forbes, an 11-year-old, blond-haired, brown-eyed fifth grader tall for her age, was struck and killed as she crossed the road to the bus. (Chahal, who has pleaded innocent to a charge of negligent homicide, declined comment.) The driver, 32-year-old Azzam Chahal, passed the bus, which had stopped on the west side of the road, from behind, traveling about 50 miles an hour, according to the report. On February 19, a Bechtel Corporation employee late for his shift at the nuclear power plant was barreling south down Wintersburg Road and did not stop for the flashing red lights of a school bus, according to a police report of the incident. Now, Hilliard blames the plant for more than just elbowing in on his boyhood freedom.

Like many of his neighbors in the sparsely settled countryside, Hilliard was never fully comfortable in its looming shadow. As a boy, Tim Hilliard watched the Palo Verde nuclear power plant rise from the desert west of Phoenix, claiming the flatland where he once rode horses.

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