A boy is dead and a woman is under investigation for DUI after authorities say she struck the teenage bicyclist over the weekend.
On Saturday, the boy and a friend were riding bikes along a road in the small Utah city of Ballard, about 150 miles southeast of Salt Lake City, when he was struck, according to the Uintah County Sheriff’s Office. The boy suffered a “severe head injury,” according to a probable cause statement.
The child, later identified as 15-year-old Dominic Charles Cole, according to a GoFundMe page, was taken to the Uintah Basin Medical Center in Roosevelt, then flown by helicopter to Primary Children’s Hospital in Salt Lake City. He died late Saturday.
When a deputy interviewed the 34-year-old woman who was driving the car, she told him she saw two bicyclists “in the middle of the roadway,” and that she “tried to avoid hitting the bicyclist but couldn’t go into the northbound lane” because there was a car coming toward her.
According to the probable cause statement, the deputy saw a liquor bottle and open beer cans on the floor in the back seat of the car; he could smell a “strong odor” of alcohol; and she failed a field sobriety test.
The woman was arrested and taken to Vernal for a blood draw, and on the way, “she became upset and started to kick at my cage and the window as she became disorderly,” the deputy wrote in the probable cause statement.
The driver is being held without bail in the Uintah County jail on suspicion of negligently operating a vehicle resulting in a death and open container.
The Salt Lake Tribune generally does not name suspects unless they have been formally charged with a crime.
As of Tuesday morning, the GoFundMe page created to help offset Cole’s funeral expenses had raised nearly $10,000.
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