The Ohio Department of Transportation has erected signs on a stretch of Interstate 71 South in Warren County to indicate that a group has adopted that portion of road in memory of Leelah Alcorn, the transgender teenager who died of suicide there nearly a year ago.

Leelah Alcorn’s name now stands over the interchange of Interstate 71 South and Ohio Route 48 where the 17-year-old from Kings Mills ran out in front of a truck early in the morning of Dec. 28.

Hours later, a note Alcorn wrote went live on the social media site Tumblr expressing anguish that her parents had put her into “Christian therapy” for gender identity issues. She wrote she wanted her death to mean something so that someone would “fix society.”

Chris Fortin, 33, is a 2001 graduate of Kings High School and a graduate of the University of Cincinnati. He led the Adopt-A-Highway effort in Alcorn’s memory. For months after Alcorn’s death, he says he drove that portion of the interstate and watched a small homemade memorial sign for Alcorn go up and disintegrate through the winter.

"I took that entrance to 71 South all the time," Fortin said. "After that first happened, someone put up one of those rickety garage-sale signs, and as I would drive by, I would see that the sign was halfway off, then 75 percent off, then it was off the frame, then the frame was gone. And I thought, ‘OK, we’re forgetting what happened.’ ”

“If she hadn’t written in her note, ‘I want my death to mean something,’ I wouldn’t have felt as strongly,” said Fortin. “I just felt like something needed to be permanent and from ODOT.”

Though he now lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, he filed the paperwork in August with ODOT for the Adopt-A-Highway program. Fortin said he hopes to schedule the first cleanup for the area in January. “I have more people than I can count who are willing to help,” he said.

More information is available through the Facebook page Fortin established.

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