HENRICO COUNTY, Virginia — Two Henrico County men were killed early on Sunday, November 8, when their SUV left the westbound lanes of Interstate 64 just before the Parham Road exit, travelled down an embankment, overturned and caught fire, Virginia State Police said. Both men were pronounced dead at the scene at about 6:30 a.m. On Monday, November 9, state police identified them as Alexander Lloyd Chaplin, 38, and Jack Philip Oppenheim, 27, both of Henrico County — finally putting names to a crash that Richmond-area television stations had reported, without identities, through Sunday.
Source: Virginia State Police via Fortune Chronicle
According to the state police preliminary investigation, the men were travelling westbound on I-64 in a 2016 Nissan Rogue when the vehicle left the roadway just before Exit 181B at Parham Road, near mile marker 183. The Rogue went down the embankment beside the highway, overturned and caught fire. State police have not said why the SUV left the road, and the cause remained under investigation on Monday, with the Virginia State Police Crash Reconstruction Team assisting.
Source: Virginia State Police via People Report
The Sunday-morning response on I-64
Henrico County fire crews were among the first to the scene on the westbound interstate early on Sunday. Incident reporting from the response described the vehicle as fully engulfed when crews arrived: firefighters applied water to the fire, and a truck company gained access to the two occupants inside the vehicle before the incident was marked under control. Westbound traffic on I-64 faced temporary restrictions on Sunday morning while emergency crews worked and investigators documented the scene.
Source: The Legal Advocate — Henrico fire / VSP incident reporting
Through Sunday, Richmond's television stations — WWBT, WTVR and WRIC among them — reported the bare outline: two people killed in a fiery crash on I-64 westbound in Henrico County, police investigating. The names waited until Monday, when state police released the identifications after the families had been reached. That sequence is normal in a fatal-crash investigation, and it is also why so many early social-media versions of this story carried ages, spellings and details that the official release on Monday did not support.
State police have not established why the Rogue left the roadway — speed, a medical emergency, a mechanical failure and driver fatigue are the kinds of factors a reconstruction examines, but none of them has been stated as a finding in this case. There was no other vehicle in the preliminary account, and no charges arise from a single-vehicle crash of this kind.
The place: I-64 at Parham Road
Parham Road is one of Henrico County's main north–south arteries, serving the county's west end — hospitals, offices and suburbs — and Exit 181B drops I-64 traffic straight onto it. Interstate 64 at that point is the Richmond region's east–west spine: westbound lanes run toward Charlottesville and the Shenandoah Valley, eastbound lanes toward downtown Richmond, the I-95 junction and ultimately Norfolk. At 6:30 on a Sunday morning the road is at its emptiest of the week, which is part of what investigators will weigh: on an uncrowded highway, a vehicle leaving the roadway points the reconstruction toward the driver, the vehicle, or something on the road itself, rather than toward traffic.
Richmond's running community spent Monday mourning Oppenheim, who was identified in local reporting as the founder of Capital Run Club, a Richmond run club whose members gather for group runs in the city — one of the communities, along with both men's families and workplaces, now absorbing the loss of two local men in a single Sunday-morning crash. Awaaz Punjab repeats that identification as local reporting attributed it; state police confirmed only the men's names, ages and home county.
Why this corridor matters to our readers
I-64 where it crosses Henrico County, and the I-95 junction a few miles east, form one of the mid-Atlantic freight corridors that Punjabi and other South Asian truckers based around Richmond, Northern Virginia and the wider region drive every week, alongside the warehouse and delivery workforce of the Richmond suburbs. A fatal crash that closes westbound lanes on a Sunday morning is, for those drivers, both a road-safety story and a working-routes story — and early-Sunday departures are a standard part of the trucking week, when drivers leave before dawn to make Monday-morning delivery windows.
What happens next
The state police investigation continues, and its next public step will be the reconstruction findings: the Crash Reconstruction Team's work — vehicle examination, scene measurements and the medical examiner's reports — is what turns Sunday's outline into an established cause, a process that typically takes weeks rather than days. Until state police state a cause, the honest record of this crash is the one above: a 2016 Nissan Rogue left westbound I-64 before the Parham Road exit early on Sunday, overturned down the embankment and burned, and Alexander Lloyd Chaplin and Jack Philip Oppenheim died at the scene. Awaaz Punjab will update this report when Virginia State Police publish their findings.