Street crew paints new yellow lines on the road — right over the roadkill

Poor roadkill, ignominiously splayed and splattered on the road for all to pity.

What could be worse?

Maybe this.

A Tulsa road crew, dutifully painting new yellow stripes on a four-lane road, recently painted those sunny new stripes right over the roadkill.

Residents in the north Tulsa neighborhood took a break from laughing and called Fox 23 in Tulsa to report the bizarre sight.

One family told the TV station they watched the crew moving down the road and thought surely it would stop and move the roadkill out of the way.

Nah.

Residents found carcasses in three spots covered with fresh paint.

One little boy even wanted to help the street crew and move the roadkill out of the way, KRMG radio in Tulsa reported. “But my mom said, ‘You can’t be out on the street alone,’” he said.

Loren Lewis, who has lived in the neighborhood more than 40 years, told Fox 23 he was surprised there weren’t more dead bodies in the way because wild and domesticated animals get killed on that road all the time.

“If the stripers stopped to pick up the roadkill on this road, there wouldn’t be any striping done,” Lewis told the TV station.

The city confessed to the peculiar paint job, telling Fox 23 in a statement that painting protocol requires crews to remove anything from the road that will get in the way of nice, clean, straight lines.

That didn’t happen this time. Apparently the striping truck operator didn’t notice the carcasses until they had already been painted over.

After the TV station aired its story, the city sent crews back to the area on Tuesday to remove the roadkill and fix the stripes.

This story was originally published July 12, 2017 at 11:53 AM with the headline "Street crew paints new yellow lines on the road — right over the roadkill."