By Parking Today staff
The parking booth where Tammie Jo Baker collected beach-access fees was never built to stop a truck. Volusia County Sheriff Mike Chitwood said as much in the hours after a pickup traveling at an estimated 40 mph slammed straight into it on June 1. “That booth isn’t made of anything, if you look at it,” Chitwood told reporters.
Baker, 63, was a longtime Volusia County employee who began working for One Parking after the parking operator took over the county’s beach parking operation. She had been inside the booth at the Dunlawton Avenue beach approach in Daytona Beach Shores, Florida, for less than a minute before the incident. According to the Volusia County Sheriff’s Office, surveillance video shows Baker entered at 12:38 p.m. By 12:40, she was dead. “Thirty-five seconds after our victim enters the booth, she’s dead,” Chitwood said.
The tragic scene raised questions about how best to ensure the safety of parking personnel working in potentially vulnerable locations at gated lots, garages, and plazas across the country.
A county scrambles for barriers
Volusia County has responded quickly, if provisionally. Officials and the sheriff’s office spent the days after the crash testing different barrier options at the Dunlawton approach, installing a replacement booth and protective barriers meant to keep a vehicle from ever reaching the attendant. The county has signaled it will evaluate safety at all of its beach ramps, and the Dunlawton ramp remains closed until further notice.
The episode has put a question on the table that the parking sector has debated for years: whether attended booths at high-risk approaches belong in service at all. Beachgoers interviewed at the scene raised it themselves. “Automated booths could prevent something like that from happening again,” one told a local TV station.
It is the uncomfortable version of a familiar trade-off. Automated entry, license plate recognition, and cashless access remove the human being from the point of impact, but they also remove the greeter, the rule-enforcer, and the set of eyes that operators have long valued at a beach gate.
Crash-rated bollards, anti-ram barriers, and setback redesigns are proven tools, and the Daytona Beach Shores case is a reminder that the booth itself is often the weakest link. It is also not the first time a vehicle has destroyed a booth on this stretch of coast, where cars are permitted to drive on the sand. An earlier crash sent a car through the booth at International Speedway Boulevard beach approach and into the ocean, injuring four people, including a child. In that incident, the attendant was not in the booth.
The driver and the charges
The driver, Deanna Harrell, 35, of Ormond Beach, Florida, was arrested June 3 on charges of vehicular homicide and DUI manslaughter. The sheriff’s office said two 911 callers reported an erratic truck striking a mailbox and a trash can and driving the wrong way in the minutes before the crash. Harrell was held under Florida’s Baker Act after the crash, released, and then arrested at a psychiatric facility, according to local reports. A judge ordered her held without bond on June 4. Investigators said additional charges are possible once blood results and a forensic analysis of the truck are complete.
Remembering Tammie Jo Baker
To the people who loved her, Baker was far more than a beach attendant. She was a mother, a grandmother and a soon-to-be great-grandmother, and her family called her the matriarch who held everyone together. “She was always smiling,” her granddaughter, Hannah McBride, told reporters. “She was always happy. She was the glue of the family. So, it’s going to be hard to pick up those pieces.”
Baker would have turned 63 on June 16. Her family has set up a GoFundMe campaign to help with funeral costs.
