A 49-year-old woman was killed on Suitland Parkway in a hit-and-run on Southeast D.C. on Tuesday night, according to D.C. police.

Cherlyn Ninette Bell was found lying unconscious near the Irving Street SE exit ramp just after 8 p.m., police said. She was declared dead on the scene.

A preliminary investigation revealed that Bell was crossing from the south side of the parkway when she was first struck by a driver, according to D.C. police.

“My mom was a great soul,” Bell’s son, Keith Dawson, tells DCist. “She stayed to herself for the most part. She did everything to put a roof over our heads.”

Dawson said that he was told by detectives that two drivers struck his mother, and that the second driver called D.C. police after they’d gotten home. The first vehicle has yet to be identified and the family is waiting on autopsy results, Dawson says.

D.C. police, which does not generally release traffic-related incident reports, declined to confirm those details.

Someone called Dawson to say that his mother was lying in the street for hours while police searched the area, he says, which was also noted by several witnesses on Twitter.

MPD spokesperson Alaina Gertz said in an emailed statement: “This incident remains under active investigation. At this time we do not have an exact time the victim was initially struck, therefore to assume she laid there for hours would be speculation. MPD asks that anyone with information, or may have been traveling in the area at the time of this incident to contact us at (202) 727-9099/text us at 50411.”

Residents say that pedestrians regularly cross Suitland Parkway near Naylor Road and have called for safety improvements. A number of pedestrians have been struck and killed in the two-mile stretch between Naylor and Stanton Roads SE over the past few years, including a hit-and-run by an alleged drunk driver in 2015.

Some suggest creating a crosswalk or pedestrian bridge to get passersby safely across the parkway where drivers whiz by at high speeds.

Travis Brown, who moved to the area two years ago, says he’s seen increased foot traffic on that stretch between Stanton and Naylor roads SE, where there are convenience stores and public housing, but insufficient crosswalks.

Brown says he’s reached out to city officials to push the idea of providing a safer walkway there. He’s since gotten responses from Ward 8 Councilmember Trayon White, but was also discouraged by a response from an ANC commissioner who suggested pedestrians were to blame for not knowing how to use sidewalks.

“As I’ve seen the extra foot traffic, I thought, ‘Someone is bound to get hit,'” Brown says. “It’s systemic, the lack of focus on that area. There’s a bike trail there and it’s barely usable, constantly littered. You go to all the other wards and the trails are perfectly clear. You get this sense that there’s an antagonistic view of Ward 8, that they don’t deserve the same resources.”

Bike and pedestrian advocates gathered in June last year to mourn traffic deaths in Ward 8. By that point in 2019, more than half of the city’s traffic fatalities occurred in the ward.

Dawson says he found out about Tuesday’s hit-and-run as more and more people shared information on Twitter. He has had difficulty finding out the details, just as he struggles to describe how much his mother meant to him and his five siblings. “I just don’t have the words right now,” he says.

This story has been updated with a statement from MPD.