Witnesses of Saturday’s deadly collision in which a pickup truck barreled through a youth soccer game in Kansas, killing two people and injuring nearly a dozen, said they are haunted by what they saw and heard.
Cole Adrian, 6, and Nicholas Schafer, 35, were killed in the incident that unfolded shortly before 3:30 p.m. in Wichita at the city-owned Stryker Sports Complex, police said.
The deceased were both from McPherson, Kansas, but were not related to each other, a spokesperson for the Wichita Police Department said. Ten others, between 5 and 68 years old, were also hit and hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries, Wichita Police Capt. Aaron Moses said.
Police said a dark-colored Chevrolet pickup drove onto a field during a youth soccer game and struck children and adults.
Erica Case said it was halftime during her 9-year-old son’s soccer game on an adjacent field when she first heard an engine revving followed by several “boom” sounds.
“I saw the truck hitting things. I saw debris flying in the air,” she recalled. “I don’t know if it was a cone, a chair or a person, but you could see matter flying as the truck was barreling through the soccer field at a decent rate of speed.”
She said the sound will haunt her.
“The moment that I recognized that that wasn’t gunshots, that that was bodies, I lost it,” Case said. “I lost it because it wasn’t just adults. It was also children.”
Case recalled the mother of another boy shouting that she was a nurse and needed to get to the injured. Case said she told her she’d watch her boy and 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.
“There are a lot of silent heroes that I know experienced much worse than I did, having to do mouth-to-mouth or CPR on somebody that’d been ran over by a truck,” Case said.
David Griekspoor was at the complex with his nephew, who also plays soccer, when he witnessed the incident.
“It sounded like small gunfire,” he said. “Bap, bap, bap.”
He said it wasn’t clear what was producing the sound until he focused on the truck. “You look up, and you just see the truck going through a line of people,” Griekspoor said.
He said his brother and sister-in-law went to check on children nearby as he grabbed his nephew and “backed out of there.” All ended up safe, Griekspoor said.
Police said they interviewed more than 30 witnesses in the wake of the tragedy.
The pickup’s driver, a 34-year-old from Garden City, Kansas, was taken into custody but was 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 had two children in the pickup at the time and that she had a child who had a soccer game on a different field at the complex.
The driver was cooperating with officers, said Moses, the police captain.
What caused the pickup to drive through the field was still under investigation, and police said the results of an examination of the vehicle, as well as of toxicology testing on the driver, were pending.
