GREENVILLE – An eight-year child involved in a June 28 automobile accident near Millennium has succumbed to the injuries he sustained in that two-car crash.

Bruce Justin Jernigan, a rising 4th grader at Windsor Elementary School, died early Thursday morning at Pitt Memorial Hospital in Greenville. He had been in the Intensive Care Unit there since the accident.

Meanwhile, the now-fatal crash remains under investigation by the North Carolina State Highway Patrol, according to Troop A, District II First Sgt. Todd Lane.

Jernigan was seated as a back seat passenger in a 2006 Suzuki passenger car operated by his grandmother, Vivian Lynn Miller, 53, of Aulander. She had stopped her vehicle at the stop sign at the intersection of NC 11 Business (Millennium Road) and NC 11 Bypass at around 9:30 a.m. on Sunday, June 28.

According to North Carolina Highway Patrol Trooper W.T. Smith, who investigated the accident, Miller was turning her car left at the intersection where it was struck by a 2001 Chevrolet Suburban, operated by 30-year-old Crystal Leigh Renee Barnes of Winterville, traveling south on NC 11 Bypass.

Jernigan and Jeffery Miller, the son of the driver and also a back-seat passenger, were both critically injured in the accident and airlifted to Pitt Memorial Hospital. Jeffery Miller remains hospitalized.

Mrs. Miller and her husband, 53-year-old Daniel Walter Miller (a front seat passenger), were not seriously injured. Neither was Barnes.

The fatality was the 11th in the local district (Bertie, Gates and Hertford counties) this year. Six of those fatalities have occurred in Hertford County.

Jernigan’s full obituary is listed on page 7A of today’s edition.