A quiet Saturday morning in Ross County turned into something nobody saw coming. A woman was walking along U.S. 35 near mile marker 3 in Concord Township when a car hit her and she never got back up. By the time anyone figured out what had really happened out there, it was already too late.
It started with a phone call that didn’t even sound like an emergency. Just before 8:30 in the morning on May 16, 2026, someone reached out to the Ohio State Highway Patrol’s Jackson Communication Center to report what looked like an object sitting on the side of the highway. Nothing dramatic. Nothing that screamed tragedy. Just something on the road that seemed out of place. Officers rolled out to check on it, probably expecting to clear a piece of debris or maybe a broken-down vehicle. What they found instead stopped everything cold.
Lying there on that stretch of U.S. 35 was 45-year-old Jolayne C. Blake, a woman from Chillicothe who had been walking in the roadway when a 2021 Kia K5 came through and struck her. She was pronounced dead right there at the scene. No hospital rush, no last-ditch effort in an emergency room. Gone, just like that, on a Saturday morning when most folks were still having their first cup of coffee.
Jolayne was somebody’s neighbor, somebody’s friend, somebody’s family. She lived right there in Chillicothe, the same town she died trying to get through. There’s something gut-wrenching about that — about a person losing their life just miles from home on an ordinary road they’d probably traveled a hundred times before. After the scene was processed, her body was transported to the Montgomery County Coroner’s Office through Haller Funeral Home, beginning the long, painful process that follows a sudden, violent loss.
The driver behind the wheel of that Kia, 28-year-old Paitaan White of Chillicothe, walked away without a scratch. He was heading northwest on U.S. 35 when he hit Blake. Whether he ever saw her before the impact is part of what investigators are still trying to piece together. The fact that the initial call described Jolayne as just an object on the side of the road makes the whole thing hit even harder. That’s a human being. That’s somebody’s whole world, reduced to an unidentified shape on the pavement before anyone even knew to look for her.
Troopers from the Chillicothe Post of the Ohio State Highway Patrol locked down that stretch of highway and got to work. They combed through the evidence, documented everything in sight, and started the process of reconstructing exactly how the morning unfolded. It’s meticulous, methodical work — the kind that takes time — but it’s the only way to get real answers about what went wrong and why. Once they wrapped up at the scene, the roadway was reopened to traffic.
The investigation is still active and ongoing. State troopers are digging into every possible contributing factor — road conditions, visibility, speed, everything that could help explain how a woman ended up walking on a federal highway on a Saturday morning and never made it home. Jolayne C. Blake deserves that much. She deserves the full truth, and the people who loved her deserve it even more.
