Residential street won’t be renamed for fallen officer
By Bobby Bryant, Editor, editor@newsandpress.net
“Sgt. Carraway Street” won’t be a Darlington residential address after all.
After objections from longtime residents, the city’s Planning Commission last week rejected a proposal to rename Southern Pine Street after Sgt. Terrence Carraway, a Darlington resident and 30-year veteran of the Florence Police Department who was killed Oct. 3 when a gunman ambushed law-enforcement officers.
The four Planning Commission members in attendance at a March 19 public hearing on the name change voted unanimously against the proposal after several people objected to the plan, said Darlington planning director Lisa Chalian-Rock.
No one had anything against Carraway, who has been hailed as a hero many times since the shootings that killed him and another officer, Rock said. But residents didn’t want to go through the trouble and cost of changing their addresses on driver’s licenses, passports and the like, she said.
The Postal Service said that even if residents had failed to change their addresses with utility companies, banks, employers and other businesses, mail sent to Southern Pine Street still would have been delivered properly, according to Rock. About 48 people live on that street, and many have lived there several decades, Rock said.
One woman at the hearing who didn’t want the street name changed had lived on Southern Pine Street for 20 years, Rock said.
City Council members are now looking at the possibility of having an interchange, such as the U.S. 52 Bypass, or part of a street, perhaps on South Main Street, named in honor of Carraway, Rock said. Naming an interchange for Carraway would need the state Legislature’s approval, she said.
Darlington City Council first endorsed renaming a street for Carraway in November, on the same night Carraway’s family was presented with a key to the city.