States Erect Limits to Roadside Memorials : Florida families’ cross marking vehicle deaths of teens is part of a growing, and problematic, trend.

Even speeding by at 80 mph, motorists can’t miss it. Garlanded with flowers, ribbons and teddy bears, the wooden cross stands four feet tall and is anchored in a bucket of concrete buried in the broad, sloping median of Interstate 75 just north of here.

Carved into the white crosspiece are the names Shane Matthews and Shaun Fischer, and the date they died--Jan. 18, 1996.

“I want people to drive by and know there were two deaths here,” said Carol Matthews, whose son was just 16 when the truck in which he was riding flipped over, killing him and his 18-year-old friend.

“We hope the flowers and all the stuff on the cross convey how hard it is to lose someone. Maybe they’ll slow down. He was a special kid. Everyone’s kids are. We can’t let these boys be just another statistic.”

As poignant and understandable as Matthews’ sentiments are, that memorial and others like it have created a predicament for Florida officials who have decided to clamp down on the proliferation of roadside memorials on state highways. “We understand the intentions of people who put these up,” said Dick Kane, spokesman for the Florida Department of Transportation. “But these shrines are starting to take on a life of their own. It’s a safety issue.”

But the DOT’s plan to replace homemade memorials with a standardized marker has raised another controversy. Just days after state workers last month began to replace roadside shrines with a simple, 2-foot white plastic marker, civil rights groups complained that it looked too much like a cross.

“It was, in fact, a cross,” said Arthur Teitelbaum, southern area director of the Anti-Defamation League, “and it raised a constitutional concern of church-state separation.”

Teitelbaum said DOT officials brushed aside his group’s initial objections, and it was not until the word “lawsuit” was mentioned that the design was reconsidered.

Eventually, DOT Secretary Ben Watts ordered highway workers to pull up the first dozen or so roadside markers and proposed a new design--a circular memorial featuring the words “Drive Safely” and a space for the name of the deceased.

“It was never our intention to offend anyone with our new policy; we simply want to make motorists more aware of highway safety when they drive by the memorial markers,” Watts said.

Florida is one of the first states in the nation to try to regulate roadside memorials, which seem to be sprouting up at the sites of traffic fatalities in greater abundance and size. For years, some local chapters of Mothers Against Drunk Driving placed small crosses at the scene of alcohol-related fatalities, but a few family-sponsored memorials have become elaborate traffic hazards, the Florida DOT says.

“We had one concrete cross that took three men to remove, and our maintenance men aren’t wimps,” Kane says. “It would be a tragic irony if someone died after hitting a nine-foot concrete cross.”

At the request of a victim’s family, Idaho now installs a “Gold Star” marker at the scene of a fatality. South Dakota puts up signs at the site of an alcohol-involved death. And Washington state officials last year began to permit memorial plantings. “We are facilitating the grieving process. But religious symbols are not allowed; we don’t want shrines out there,” says Lloyd Ensley, a DOT official in Olympia.

Removing personal memorials, or even mowing around them, can be trying for highway crews. In Georgia recently, Johnny Martin, a DOT worker who is also a minister, complained that dismantling a memorial, or even being on the scene of a death, made him uneasy.

Matthews says she can understand the bureaucratic need to regulate roadside memorials. But she also hopes the state can understand the family’s need to dedicate the spot where their loved ones died.

Three times in a year, state workers have removed the Matthews-Fischer cross, and three times, Matthews’ husband has reclaimed it from a maintenance shed and put it back.

“We’ve been told that it’s illegal, and the mowing crew will take it out again,” Matthews says. “And we’ve basically told them we’re going to keep putting it up.

“They have to understand that that cross is there because of what we feel in our hearts, about our loss. It’s something of Shane.

“If they set some guidelines for families, for markers of a certain size, made of certain material, or if they put something up, I will have to live with it. But we’ll probably personalize it.”