Amarillo police have arrested a 48-year-old woman after a fatal hit-and-run on Bell Street on Wednesday evening, November 4, in which a pedestrian was killed and a pickup driver who had stopped to help was seriously injured when a second vehicle struck them both and fled, the Amarillo Police Department said.
Source: Amarillo Tribune (Amarillo Police Department)
Officers were sent to a vehicle-pedestrian crash on the 4100 block of Bell Street, near Sandie Drive, on Wednesday evening. While they were on their way, the department received another call reporting that another person on foot had been struck — the first sign, from the calls themselves, that this was not one crash but two, seconds apart, at the same place.
Investigators pieced together this sequence. A white pickup truck — identified in fuller reporting as a white Dodge Ram — was travelling south on Bell Street and had moved into the centre turn lane to turn left onto Granada Drive. It struck a pedestrian who was crossing Bell Street from east to west. The pedestrian fell into the northbound lanes.
The pickup driver stopped, got out of his truck and went to check on the injured pedestrian — the act, witnesses and police accounts agree, of a driver trying to help. It was then that a dark-coloured GMC Sierra came through and hit both of them: the pedestrian lying in the road and the driver standing beside him. The Sierra did not stop. It fled the scene.
The victim, the injured driver, and the arrest
The pedestrian died at the scene from injuries sustained in the crash, police said. An autopsy has been ordered. The victim's name has not been released, because the victim's next of kin had not been notified when police provided their information. The pickup driver was taken to a hospital with serious injuries that were not life-threatening.
Officers later located the GMC Sierra and arrested its driver, Laura Jean Koenig, 48. Koenig was booked into the Randall County Jail and charged with collision involving death — reported in fuller accounts as collision involving personal injury or death, the charge Texas police use when a driver is accused of leaving the scene of a crash in which someone was hurt or killed. Koenig is presumed innocent unless proven guilty in court, and the charge is an allegation until a court decides it.
Police have not named the pedestrian who died, have not said whether speed, alcohol or any other factor played a part in either crash, and have not announced a court date or bond for Koenig in the reports published so far. The autopsy results and the victim's identity — after family notification — are the next facts expected in this case.
Why a stopped driver was in the road at all
The detail at the centre of this case is the one Amarillo drivers will recognise immediately: the pickup driver did what road-safety advice tells drivers to do after striking someone — he stopped and went to help. Texas law requires a driver involved in a crash involving injury or death to stop, and the first driver in this sequence stopped. The fatal second strike is a reminder of the danger built into that moment on a wide, fast, multi-lane arterial like Bell Street at night: a person standing in live traffic lanes, beside an injured person, is exposed to every vehicle that follows. Police have not said whether the Sierra driver is alleged to have seen the scene before striking the two men, and that question is now part of the investigation and the court case.
Bell Street is one of Amarillo's main north-south commercial corridors, carrying local traffic as well as drivers crossing the city between Interstate 40 and the neighbourhoods of southwest Amarillo — a mix of through traffic, turning vehicles and pedestrians crossing wide lanes that is familiar in Texas Panhandle cities and across the trucking corridors our readers drive. Wednesday evening's crashes happened in the centre of that mix, at a turn-lane crossing point near Granada Drive.
What happens next
The investigation by the Amarillo Police Department continues, the autopsy will establish the pedestrian's cause of death formally, and police will release the victim's name once the family has been notified. Koenig's case will proceed in Randall County, where she is jailed on the collision-involving-death charge; further charges, if any, are for prosecutors to decide as the investigation file is completed. Anyone who witnessed the crashes on Bell Street on Wednesday evening, or who saw the dark-coloured GMC Sierra leaving the area, should contact the Amarillo Police Department.