A 24-year-old Norwegian man rollerblading across the United States died after an 82-year-old Kansas woman allegedly struck him with her SUV and drove away without stopping.
Joachim Lanham was on day 22 of a cross-country trek from New York to Los Angeles when an off-duty first responder found him critically injured in a roadside ditch in Salina, Kansas, roughly 175 miles from Kansas City, on Sept. 5, according to the Wichita Eagle.
He was taken to Salina Regional Health Center and then transferred to the intensive care unit at Wesley Medical Center in Wichita, where he spent six days in a medically induced coma before dying on Sept. 11.
Lanham’s family wrote on his Instagram that his brother Michael was at his side holding his hand throughout that week and at the end.
The Saline County Sheriff’s Office said the driver came forward while investigators were still working the scene.
“An 82-year-old female said she had been driving a 2013 Ford Edge SUV going west on Country Club Road,” the sheriff’s office told KSAL. “She stated that she thought she hit something, turned around to check the area, but didn’t see anything, so she continued her journey home.”
Lt. Scott Trembley of the Saline County Sheriff’s Office told the Wichita Eagle that once the woman got home, she noticed damage to her vehicle and called a friend, who then went back to the scene with her.
“She knew she struck something. She just wasn’t sure what,” Trembley said.
The case has been turned over to the Saline County Attorney’s Office, which will determine whether the driver faces any charges. As of now, no charges have been filed.
Just 40 minutes before the crash, Lanham had been on the phone with his parents, telling them what long-distance rollerblading meant to him, his family said. Earlier that day he had posted a video of himself skating Kansas’s empty roads.
“I’m in Kansas baby, the heatwave has been kicking my ass, I thought I knew what hot, but nothing like this,” he wrote. “My weather forecast app keeps telling me to check up on my loved ones and to seek refuge, but I’m on a mission. Mother nature will definitely slow me down but I will succeed.”
Lanham had already skated more than 3,665 miles across Australia earlier this year. His family thanked his followers for the support they gave him “on his wild adventures” and shared the last video he recorded before the crash, showing a butterfly resting on his foot.
