A woman who drove through a Kansas youth soccer game and killed two people, including a 6-year-old boy, won't be criminally charged, officials said Thursday.
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The Oct. 17 crash at Stryker Sports Complex in Wichita killed the boy and a 35-year-old man, and injured 10 others after the vehicle accelerated through the soccer field around 3:30 PM.
Authorities confirmed that the driver was not under the influence of drugs or alcohol. Instead, she was asleep in what she believed was a parked vehicle.
"I can not only find no evidence of an intentional crime, but I can find affirmative evidence that there was not an intentional crime," Sedgwick County District Attorney Marc Bennett said at a news conference.
Kansas Mother Kills Two People After Plowing Through Soccer Field
An off-duty cop and others went to the truck after it plowed through the crowd of people and found the driver crying, Bennett said.
"What they found was a sobbing — at turns described as frantic, hysterical — saying 'I'm sorry. I'm sorry, what have I done,' words to that effect," Bennett said.
Officials said that the woman woke up at 6 AM and drove nearly 200 miles to the sports complex, where her children had games.
The mom arrived at the Stryker Sports Complex around 10:40 AM and left around 1:20 PM. The sleep-deprived driver returned roughly an hour later and parked near the fields.
The crash happened less than an hour after she returned.
"She parks. She tells her kids she's tired. Which would be consistent with having gotten up that morning and driven that far," Bennett said.
Bennett and Wichita Police Chief Joe Sullivan called the incident a "tragedy" that has devastated the community.
"I also want to be honest with our community. There are some questions we may never be able to answer with complete certainty," he said.
Investigators explored whether the woman may have moved in her sleep and switched the vehicle from park to drive. Bennett said that's possible but unlikely because the foot would need to be on the brake to change gears.
An alternative scenario is that the truck was not put in park and she did not realize it, and later accelerated, he said.
Cole Adrian, 6, and Nicholas Schafer, 35, both of McPherson, Kansas, were killed. They were not related.
