A Kansas mother whose pickup truck accelerated onto a youth soccer field, killing a 6-year-old boy and a 35-year-old man, will not face criminal charges.

Sedgwick County District Attorney Marc Bennett announced the decision Thursday after a nearly month-long investigation into the October 17 tragedy at Wichita’s Stryker Sports Complex.

The result is final unless genuinely new evidence emerges—and Bennett said investigators have already pushed the case about as far as it can go.

The two people killed were Cole Adrian, 6, and Nicholas Schafer, 35, both of McPherson, Kansas. Police said they were not related.

Ten other people suffered crash-related injuries, including five children between the ages of 5 and 9. Their injuries were described as noncritical.

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KMUW’s detailed account of the charging decision says the 34-year-old woman had driven more than 200 miles from Garden City with her three children for a full day of soccer matches in Wichita.

She was driving her husband’s Chevrolet Silverado because her usual vehicle had tire problems. Investigators said she was not accustomed to driving the truck.

After the family returned from lunch and errands, the crowded parking lot left only a handful of available spaces near the fields. The woman pulled into a stall with an unobstructed path toward the playing area, told her children she planned to sleep and reclined the driver’s seat.

Her 14-year-old daughter placed sunshades across the windshield after her mother fell asleep.

Surveillance video showed the truck sitting still for 46 minutes before it suddenly accelerated over a seven-inch curb and onto the field.

The family had arrived at the complex around 10:40 that morning. The crash happened shortly after 3:25 p.m., near the end of a long day that began with a 7 a.m. departure from Garden City.

The woman told detectives she awoke to screaming inside and outside the truck. Disoriented and lying back in the reclined seat, she said she tried to sit up and reach the brake but could not stop the vehicle in time.

Investigators examined several possible explanations, including intoxication, a medical episode, mechanical failure and an intentional act.

They found no impairing substances in her blood, no medical condition that explained the crash and no mechanical defect in the truck.

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A General Motors engineer and technician traveled to Wichita to inspect the Silverado. Police also borrowed a comparable truck from a local Chevrolet dealer and reconstructed the scene.

The test showed that a Silverado left in drive could remain stalled against the parking curb. Even light pressure on the accelerator, however, could send it over the curb and toward the field.

Investigators were unable to determine precisely how the transmission ended up in drive. Bennett said the evidence supported two possibilities: the truck was mistakenly left in drive, or someone moved the shifter without the sleeping driver realizing it.

The truck’s automatic door locks became an important clue. Two of the woman’s children said they had to unlock the doors when they got out while their mother slept, and that Silverado model automatically locks its doors when shifted into drive.

KCTV’s summary of the investigation reports that officials found no evidence the woman intentionally drove onto the field or consciously decided to endanger the families watching the youth match.

Bennett said the facts also failed to establish the “conscious disregard” required to prove criminal recklessness under Kansas law.

Leaving a vehicle in drive would be negligent, the prosecutor concluded, but a single negligent mistake does not automatically become involuntary manslaughter. Kansas law requires proof of a material deviation from reasonable conduct; two deaths by themselves do not establish that legal element.

“As bad as this was, it is not a crime,” Bennett said at the news conference. He described the case as a civil matter governed by a negligence standard, where responsibility and damages can still be litigated without a criminal conviction.

The report also rejected murder, child-endangerment and other criminal theories because the evidence did not show that the woman knowingly created the danger. A civil lawsuit can still test negligence and damages without the higher proof required for a criminal conviction.

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The conclusion will be difficult for many people to accept. Two people are dead, children and adults were injured, and a normal Saturday soccer game became an unimaginable nightmare.

Wichita Police’s official incident record says more than 100 interviews, surveillance and cellphone video, toxicology testing, vehicle forensics and multiple scene reenactments were ultimately reviewed across the nearly month-long investigation.

Police Chief Joe Sullivan said investigators met with the victims’ families before the announcement and explained what the evidence did—and did not—show.

Bennett said investigators found affirmative evidence against an intentional crime, beyond the basic absence of proof.

That does not erase the losses suffered by the Adrian and Schafer families or the trauma carried by everyone on the field. It means the prosecutor concluded that Kansas criminal law could not turn a catastrophic act of negligence into a crime without proof of the required mental state.

The official record also separates the ten people hurt by the truck from an eleventh person transported for an unrelated medical complication. Temporary barriers were installed at the complex as Wichita reviewed longer-term safety changes.

The truck crossed the curb in seconds. The legal investigation lasted nearly a month.

Its answer is no charges.

This is a Guest Post from our friends over at WLTReport. View the original article here.

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