No charges for woman who drove onto Kansas soccer field, killing 2, officials say

A woman who killed two people, including a 6-year-old boy, when she drove through a Kansas soccer game last month had taken a nap in her parked vehicle before it accelerated and won’t be criminally charged, officials said Thursday.The crash on Oct.17 at the Stryker Sports Complex in Wichita killed a 6-year-old boy and a 35-year-old man, and injured 10 others when the vehicle drove through onto a soccer field at around 3:30 p.m.“I can not only find no evidence of an intentional crime, I can find affirmative evidence that there was not an intentional crime,” Sedgwick County District Attorney Marc Bennett said at a news conference.An off-duty police officer and others went to the truck after it had crashed and found the 34-year-old driver crying, Bennett said.

The woman has not been publicly identified.“What they found was a sobbing, at turns described as frantic, hysterical, saying ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, what have I done,’ — words to that effect,” Bennett said.He said the accounts of the people who were there that day said “she was sleepy, looked like she had just woken up, these are comments from witnesses who arrived there at the door and interacted with her.”The woman got up around 6 a.m.

and drove her husband’s truck from Garden City, around 200 miles away, to the sports complex where her children had games, officials said.She was not in her usual vehicle because hers had issues with tire air pressure, Sullivan said.Bennett and Wichita Police Chief Joe Sullivan called it a tragedy that has shaken the community.Sullivan said the investigation was thorough and fact-driven, and that “every lead was examined, every piece of evidence was reviewed.”“I also want to be honest with our community: There are some questions we may never be able to answer with complete certainty,” he said.Among them was whether the pickup was in park.

The driver told her kids she was going to take a nap, and reclined the seat, Sullivan said.One child went t...