SHINE — A two-vehicle collision at Paradise Road and state Highway 104 on Nov. 19 caused the death of a 76-year-old Port Ludlow man.
The State Patrol announced late Monday night that Marcus K. Daly had died at Tacoma General Hospital of injuries sustained in the wreck.
Daly was traveling in a 1999 Lexus southbound on Paradise Road when he entered the intersection with Highway 104 at 2 p.m. Nov. 19 and pulled in front of a Volkswagen van driven by Gerald M. Grady, 70, of Seattle. Grady’s van struck the Lexus in the driver’s side, the State Patrol said in a memo.
Grady was treated and discharged from Jefferson Healthcare hospital in Port Townsend.
His passenger, Elizabeth A. Bronson, 72, also of Seattle, was taken to Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. She was in critical condition in the intensive care unit on Nov. 20. Since then, her condition has improved to satisfactory, according to the Haborview nursing supervisor on Tuesday.
Seat belts were worn by both Daly and Grady but not by Bronson, troopers said.
No drugs or alcohol were involved.
The wreck was the second one at that intersection in a little more than a week and one of many that have occurred there over the years.
The state Department of Transportation plans a single-lane, metered roundabout at the intersection of Highway 104 and Paradise Bay-Shine Road. A 2019 study found that the intersection has a history of serious-injury collisions.
Construction on the $4.6 million roundabout is expected to begin in the spring, with opening anticipated next fall.
The intersection was ranked 12th in the state in terms of wrecks, according to DOT in 2019.
A collision on Nov. 11, which also stemmed from a driver on Paradise Road entering the state Highway in front of a moving vehicle, sent four people to a hospital, three of them children.
Neither alcohol nor drugs were involved in that wreck, the State Patrol said, adding that everyone wore seat belts.
Nearly 17,000 vehicles and semis travel Highway 104 each day, coming off the Hood Canal Bridge into Jefferson County, DOT said.
In February 2019, DOT published an Intersection Control Evaluation that the roundabout “to improve the flow of traffic and reduce the potential and severity of head-on or serious injury collisions,” DOT said on its website at wsdot.wa.gov.
Residents have spoken up about concerns that the roundabout would slow traffic too much and that it would not make the intersection safer.
DOT engineers have said roundabouts are safer than traditional stop sign or signal-controlled intersections.
