Mother questions WakeMed discharge after Raleigh pedestrian death on I-40

Tracy Evans says WakeMed Raleigh improperly discharged her daughter, Jena Shively, 33, shortly before Shively was killed on Interstate 40 in Raleigh, pushing hospital discharge decisions into the center of a fatal crash case. The death has raised immediate questions in Wake County about what happened after Shively left the hospital and whether WakeMed’s follow-up process did enough to protect her.

Raleigh police are investigating the fatal hit-and-run, which was reported around 12:15 a.m. Sunday, July 19, in the eastbound lanes of I-40 near South Saunders Street. ABC11 reported that Shively was a pedestrian and that multiple vehicles struck her after the initial hit-and-run. She was pronounced dead after the crash.

Evans has publicly challenged the circumstances of her daughter’s discharge from WakeMed Raleigh, saying Shively should not have been sent out shortly before the crash. The central questions now are whether the hospital gave clear discharge instructions, whether Shively had a safe way to leave the facility, and whether any family-notification, transportation, or mental-health steps were missed before she ended up on a high-speed interstate.

WakeMed’s public site says its emergency departments operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and its Raleigh Campus Adult Emergency Department is on New Bern Avenue in Raleigh. That puts the family’s complaint squarely at the point where emergency care ends and discharge planning begins, especially when a patient is leaving one of the city’s main medical campuses.

The crash also underscores how dangerous I-40 can be for people on foot in Raleigh. South Saunders Street feeds into one of the city’s busiest highway corridors, where a pedestrian hit-and-run can turn deadly in seconds and where a second or third vehicle can make survival even less likely.

For Shively’s family, the unanswered question is no longer only who struck her on I-40. It is how a 33-year-old woman ended up dead on a Wake County highway after her mother says she had just been released from WakeMed Raleigh.