The Illinois State’s Attorneys Appellate Prosecutor’s office expects to investigate a fatal collision between a Decatur woman and an Illinois State Police master sergeant who was traveling 108 mph in the seconds leading up to the wreck.
Kelly Wilson, 26, died hours after the May 7 accident. On Wednesday, her parents filed a $10 million claim against the state in the Illinois Court of Claims, saying that Master Sergeant Jeffrey Denning was negligent in driving his unmarked patrol car at 108 mph on a Decatur city street with a posted speed limit of 35 mph. Wilson died shortly after she pulled into an intersection and was struck by Denning’s vehicle. At the time, Denning was responding to a report of a police officer who had been shot in Mahomet, more than 40 miles away from the accident.
Pat Delfino, executive director of the Illinois State’s Attorneys Appellate Prosecutor’s office, said that his office has agreed to look at the case at the request of the Macon County state’s attorney’s office. Delfino said that his office was called in because a top employee in the Macon County prosecutor’s office is married to a close friend of Denning’s, which raised concerns about the potential for a conflict of interest.
While he has spoken with the Macon County’s state’s attorney’s office, Delfino said that he has not yet received a required court order formally giving his office jurisdiction, and so the appellate prosecutor’s investigation has not yet begun.
“We’re going to review it to make a determination if there is any possibility of criminal charges,” Delfino said. “I think that’s something everyone wants to know. There’s just something that doesn’t set well, going 108 on a city street. What, if any, possibility of criminal charges might be in there? And I emphasize ‘if any.’”
The case is, at least potentially, complicated by autopsy findings that show Wilson had a blood-alcohol content of .094 percent and traces of marijuana in her system, although Michael Day, the Macon County coroner, has said that the marijuana could have been in her system for days. A coroner’s jury ruled that Kelly’s death was an accident.
Timothy Shay, attorney for Kelly’s parents, said that Denning was traveling so fast that Kelly could not have reacted even if she had had no alcohol in her system.
Denning was driving an unmarked patrol car. The emergency lights were activated. A State Police investigator told the inquest jury that one witness heard a siren and another did not. Shay said that he has found two eyewitnesses who say that no audio siren was activated when the collision occurred shortly after 11 p.m.
“Why, at 108, he doesn’t have it on all the time is beyond me,” Shay said. “The eyewitnesses say it was like a concussive effect when he went past them – they felt the vehicle traveling past them.”
Contact Bruce Rushton at brushton@illinoistimes.com.
This article appears in Sep 1-7, 2016.
