For sale: 22 acres that include a tribute to an NCDOT worker who was killed on the job

Richard Stradling
·2 min read

The State of North Carolina is looking to sell nearly 22 acres between Raleigh and Cary that include a road the N.C. Department of Transportation calls Roscoe Trail.

NCDOT named the private road in honor of Roscoe Narron, a driver for the department’s motorist assistance program now known as the Safety Patrol. Narron died in 2001 after a Ford Excursion slammed into the back of his patrol truck, which he and a partner had parked behind two state Highway Patrol cruisers after an accident on Interstate 40 near Lake Crabtree.

Now Roscoe Trail and the mostly wooded land around it may soon have a new owner. The state is asking $8.9 million, according to a listing on the surplus property website. The land is across Trenton Road from the campus of software analytics company SAS, near fields where N.C. State University’s Small Ruminant Educational Unit grazes goats and sheep.

The sale is the latest move by the state to cash in on its considerable holdings of valuable land in and around Raleigh. The new headquarters for software company Bandwidth, Cary’s new Fenton development and much of Wade, a mixed-use development near PNC Arena, are all on land formerly owned by the state.

The General Assembly has also directed the state to sell two office complexes inside the Raleigh Beltline — the former headquarters of the Division of Motor Vehicles on New Bern Avenue and the Division of Employment Security off Wade Avenue.

NCDOT acquired the Roscoe Trail property in 1983 and used it to house workers in modular office buildings. Most of those workers were cycled through to better, more permanent locations, said spokesman Jamie Kritzer, and only a program that oversees mowing and litter cleanup remains in a trailer there.

NCDOT will be able to use proceeds from the sale of the land for other facilities, Kritzer said. The property is zoned for office and institutional use.

Roscoe Trail is private, not part of the state road system, so it could disappear under new ownership.

Narron was 64 when he died. He had retired as a furniture store manager and been working for what was then known as the Incident Management Assistance Patrol or IMAP for nearly seven years.

The two state troopers had stopped in the narrow median of I-40, stobe lights flashing, when Narron and a driver he was training pulled up behind them. Their yellow truck also had emergency lights and a big flashing arrow on the back to warn cars to shift to the right, but the driver of the Excursion didn’t heed them until it was too late.

Narron suffered severe head injuries and died three weeks later.

For more information about the Roscoe Trail property, go to the state’s surplus property website, ncadmin.nc.gov/divisions/state-property.

Incident Management Assistance Patrol employee Roscoe Narron patrols Interstate 40 in 2001. Narron died that year after his truck was hit from behind on I-40.
Incident Management Assistance Patrol employee Roscoe Narron patrols Interstate 40 in 2001. Narron died that year after his truck was hit from behind on I-40.