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Milton loses suit filed by parents in wrongful death City to pay $35 million in roadway fatality case By AMBER PERRY amber@appenmedia.com
family tree for a few decades but added a second tree on her ancestry.com account for Ebenezer Cemetery out of total fascination. She’s been involved in its restoration since 2018, the same year Ebenezer Methodist took ownership.
MILTON, Ga. — The City of Milton has been ordered to pay $35 million to the parents of Joshua Chang, who died in November 2016 after hitting a concrete planter off Batesville Road. A senior at Yale University at the time, the 21-year-old Chang was visiting home in Canton during Thanksgiving break. Chang was on his way back to Canton when he swerved on Batesville Road, believed to be dodging a deer or vehicle, and hit a planter on an unpaved shoulder at the entrance to the Little River Farms event venue. The planter, 3 feet high and 8.5 feet in diameter, was made of a tractor tire encased in stone and concrete. Chang was still alive when EMTs arrived, but he died at the scene. According to the medical examiner’s report, he died of an aortic transection caused by blunt force trauma sustained in the crash. Chang’s parents, John Chang and Rebecca Zhu, argued that if Milton had removed the planter from the shoulder, as required by its own
See CEMETERY, Page 10
See DEATH, Page 4
AMBER PERRY/APPEN MEDIA
Shirley Lowe, Ebenezer Cemetery caretaker, stands next to the cemetery map. She has been involved since 2018, the year Ebenezer Methodist Church took ownership.
Caretaker for Ebenezer Cemetery tends ‘patchwork quilt’ of graves By AMBER PERRY amber@appenmedia.com MILTON, Ga. — In her tenure as caretaker, Shirley Lowe has transformed Ebenezer Cemetery from disrepair into beautified sacred ground, bursting with flowers, and she can tell you the story of
just about everyone buried there. “I think God has blessed this cemetery,” Lowe said. “I mean, it’s sacred ground. It just happened bit by bit.” She often says the cemetery on Arnold Mill Road is a “patchwork quilt,” pieced together over the years. Lowe had been studying her own