Six teen-agers cleaning up roadside trash as restitution for minor crimes were killed March/2000 on a busy interstate highway when a white mini van drifted into the median after the driver twenty year old Jessica Williams fell asleep.

Silver State pays the county to pick up trash that blows off its garbage trucks as they head to the landfill near Apex, a few miles north of the accident site.

"I always just assumed that they went to parks, I didn't know they were off on the side of the road." Said Lorene Boggs the mother of a child on a work crew.

Doug Gould can't understand why it was necessary to have his boy, Scott Garner Jr., 14, picking up trash in the middle of the busiest interstate in Nevada.

"What were they even doing out there?" Gould asked. "It makes no sense. It's Sunday afternoon, everyone is in the process of leaving Las Vegas, and the county has these kids out in the middle of a super-expressway ... you would think they would have had some safeguards."

Garner, of Henderson, was doing community service to clear a burglary charge from his juvenile record and was one of six teens killed near the Las Vegas Motor Speedway. Also killed were Las Vegans Anthony T. Smith, 14, Alberto Puig, 16, Rebeccah Glicken, 15,Malina Stoltzfus, 15, and Jennifer Booth, 16. The attorney elicited evidence that no signs, pylons or flagmen were present to warn drivers that children were working in the area.

"These young folks were extremely close to the freeway," Watkins said.