A Missing Stop Sign Is Causing Hazards

An ABC-7 employee noticed an issue at an intersection in West El Paso back in December. Months later, he noticed two stop signs on a service road within the Sunland Plaza, near Marshalls, were no longer standing.

On Monday, a camera crew camped out at the intersection. Almost an hour went by with nothing out of the ordinary was noticed, than all of the sudden three near-misses occurred within a handful of minutes.

?People need to slow down and pay attention,? said Jessa Beach, a personal trainer who our cameras caught almost being hit by another car.

Beach was driving away from Target, where a stop sign no longer remains. Without the sign, she assumed it was fine to drive when another vehicle cut across the road.

?To be honest, it?s the first time I didn?t notice a stop sign there,? said Beach. ?It caused, I guess you could say, an almost run-in with another patron that was unaware that the stop sign is removed.?

According to the El Paso Department of Transportation, the intersection lies on private property. Several of the store managers who work at stores within the Sunland Plaza were contacted, but didn?t know who ran the facilities.

A little bit of digging online revealed that a company called Realty Income Texas Properties LP owned the property. A representative of their parent company questioned whether it was the city?s job to keep the signage up; when I explained that the city told me they were not in charge the representative said that a tenant, Sports Authority, was responsible for those types of issues.

The manager of Sports Authority in west El Paso said he noticed one of the stop signs was down a few days ago, and that he wrote up a work order and sent it to corporate. As for the second sign, he said he had not noticed it but would look into the issue.

As for Jessa Beach, one of the several people who nearly got in an accident on Monday, she had some advice for everyone else: ?slow down, and pay attention.?