Witnesses to Saturday’s deadly collision in which a pickup truck plowed into a youth football game in Kansas, killing two people and injuring nearly a dozen others, said they were haunted by what they saw and heard.
Cole Adrian, 6, and Nicholas Schafer, 35, were killed in the incident, which occurred shortly before 3:30 p.m. at the city-owned Stryker Sports Complex in Wichita, police said.
The deceased were both from McPherson, Kansas, but were not related, a Wichita police spokesperson said. Ten other people, ranging in age from 5 to 68, were also struck and hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries, Police Capt. Aaron Moses said.
Police said a dark Chevrolet pickup truck drove onto a field during a youth football game and struck children and adults.
Erica Case said it was halftime at her 9-year-old son’s soccer game on an adjacent field when she first heard an engine revving, followed by several “boom” noises.
“I saw the truck hit things. I saw debris flying through the air,” she recalls. “I don’t know if it was a cone, a chair or a person, but you could see the material flying as the truck crossed the football field at a decent speed.”
She said the sound would haunt her.
“The moment I realized it wasn’t gunshots, it was bodies, I lost my mind,” Case said. “I lost it because it wasn’t just the adults. There were the children too.”
Case remembers another boy’s mother shouting that she was a nurse and needed to go to the injured. Case said she told him she would watch her boy, then took the woman’s son to safety amid the chaos.
It took about 10 minutes for emergency services to arrive, she said, but people began helping the victims during that time.
“I know a lot of silent heroes who have had it much worse than me, having to do mouth-to-mouth or CPR on someone who had been hit by a truck,” Case said.
David Griekspoor was at the complex with his nephew, who also plays football, when he witnessed the incident.
“It sounded like little gunshots,” he said. “Bap, bap, bap.”
He said it wasn’t clear what was making the sound until he focused on the truck. “You look up and you see the truck going through a line of people,” Griekspoor said.
He said his brother and sister-in-law went to check on the children nearby as he grabbed his nephew and “backed away.” Everything ended safely, Griekspoor said.
Police said they interviewed more than 30 witnesses.
The driver of the pickup truck, a 34-year-old woman from Garden City, Kansas, was arrested but later released after police consulted with the Sedgwick County District Attorney’s Office. She has not been charged with a crime and has not been identified.
Police said the woman, who had two children in the van, had a child playing a soccer game on another field at the complex.
The driver was cooperating with officers, said Moses, the police captain.
Why the pickup truck drove through the field is still under investigation, and police said the results of an examination of the vehicle, as well as toxicology tests performed on the driver, were pending.
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