A drink driver with half a dozen empty beer cans in his vehicle who rammed into the back of two cyclists, before using his SUV to run over one of the cyclists as they lay on the ground after the impact, has been arrested and charged in Texas, as cyclists have labelled the incident “attempted murder”.
31-year-old Benjamin Hylander was driving a white Subaru near the Dallas Fort Worth International Airport in Dallas, Texas on Monday when he came across a group of cyclists riding at 30km/hr in the right lane of Airfield Drive around the airport, a popular place for group rides.
A shocking video captured by one of the members of the group ride shows the driver come up behind the riders at 60km/hr and ram two cyclists who were riding at the back, and then drive over 69-year-old Thomas Geppert, one of the fallen cyclists.
*Warning: Some may find the footage upsetting, viewer discretion advised*
𝐒𝐂𝐀𝐑𝐘: A Texas driver has been arrested after hitting a cyclist near Dallas Fort Worth International Airport.
Other people reportedly chased down the driver, and he was arrested.
Roughly 130,000 bicyclists are injured each year in crashes on the roadways and roughly… pic.twitter.com/ZfPDoe5yDy
— RedWave Press (@RedWave_Press) June 19, 2024
Geppert was transported to Baylor Scott & White Medical Center in Grapevine with a severe laceration, and a CT scan also revealed that he suffered a concussion. The other victim, 65-year-old Deborah Eads was treated at the scene for a severe laceration, reports CBS News.
“All of a sudden, something pushes me from behind,” Geppert, who suffered fractured rib and injuries to his hamstring, said. “Then I could feel myself falling from the right, and then that's pretty much the last thing I remember.”
“I was unconscious for a number of minutes. I guess some people thought I wasn't breathing. [I was] Just so lucky it happened to be my thigh, and I think the bike kind of elevated the car a little bit.”
“Just overall amazingly lucky that I'm still alive,” he added, saying he’s grateful that he can still walk.
> Shocking footage of Florida collision shows moment group ride hit by driver of SUV
The other cyclists followed Hylander, an American Airlines employee, to a Shell petrol station and told him to come back to the crash. After returning to the scene, the police report states that tried to rush toward the emergency medical crews who were treating Geppert, with officers having to pull him back.
Hylander admitted to drinking alcohol before driving, with a breathalyser test showing his blood alcohol concentration as over the minimum threshold DWI charge of 0.15. Investigators later found six empty cans of Voodoo Ranger Juice Force from a backpack in the SUV and two cans of Coors Light in the grass near Hylander's vehicle.
He is currently in custody at the Tarrant County Corrections Center, charged with two counts of intoxication assault with a vehicle, one count of accident involving injury, and one count of driving while intoxicated. His employer is listed as American Airlines. American Airlines also said that the carrier decided on Wednesday that Hylander would be withheld from service.
The cyclist is expected to be okay and the photo below is the suspect being arrested by police. Video/Photo from @auroramystpic.twitter.com/5u901Bpdc7
— RedWave Press (@RedWave_Press) June 19, 2024
The news comes just six months after Illinois Supreme Court declared that cyclists were "only permitted users of the road, not intended", sending many cyclists in America into a state of shock and disbelief, who blasted the decision as "asinine" and "backwards".
> Texas teen who ran over six cyclists charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon
Just yesterday, we reported that road safety campaigners in Chicago worryingly claimed it was “just a matter of time before one of us is killed biking”, after three volunteers from the Bike Lane Uprising campaign were injured after being hit by drivers — all while either going to or returning from events about cycling safety.
And a day before that, a new video emerged showing a pick-up truck driver who drove into a group of 20 cyclists in Phoenix, Arizona, leaving two dead and 11 injured, sobbing on the phone with his partner, while call records also showed that he didn’t dial 911 after the crash.
One of the cyclists involved in the crash was Clay Wells, an experienced cyclist who was the most severely injured out of everyone and spent more than 80 days at the medical facility.
When asked if he felt the system had failed him, after the county attorney refused to pursue felony charges because there was “not enough evidence”, he said: “I feel like the County Attorney’s office failed us.
“If you read the NTSB report, I don’t understand how there is any way possible you could not argue, at least to a presiding judge, to go forward that you couldn’t prove recklessness, especially those video links… of him getting on his phone, Snapchatting.”
Earlier this year, road.cc obtained shocking footage showing a 77-year-old driver of an SUV on the wrong side of the road in Florida"well-above the speed limit" and disoriented for "unknown reasons" going head-on into a group of eight cyclists, injuring seven with two in critical condition.
The cyclists, much similar to this incident from Dallas, Texas, were riding two abreast at the break of dawn in Palm Beach County, Florida on a two-lane road with no hard shoulder and a 35mph speed limit. They were headed north when suddenly, the driver came at them head-on from the opposite side in the wrong lane and went straight ahead with her Kia Soul without slowing down.
Following the crash, cyclists from Florida made an emotional plea for urgent measures to improve road safety. One of the riders involved, Cameron Oster, said: “There's no bike lane. There's no shoulder. There's not even unpaved run-off. So if you ride your bike within six inches of the white line on the shoulder of the road, your arm will actually hit branches that are hanging over that white shoulder line.”
Another member of the Florida Share the Road Coalition (FSRC), Richard Gertler, said he had been hit before and called on the campaign to “humanise” cyclists because “all too often a driver will start yelling" as “we're not people to them [...] just an obstacle”.
“Come pedal in our shoes for a day and see what we experience,” he said. “We're people. We're somebody's mother, father, son, daughter.”
In 2021, a teenager crashed into a group of six cyclists in Texas after allegedly ‘rolling coal’ at them, and was later charged with six counts of felony aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.
Before crashing into the group of cyclists who were training for IronMan Texas, the 16-year-old had reportedly blown at them black smoke on purpose from the modified exhaust of a black Ford F-250 pick-up truck, owned by his parents Jason and Jennifer Arnold.