MARTINSBURG, W.Va. — A Rhode Island man’s five-year-old daughter was allegedly not in a car seat or wearing a seatbelt when his pickup truck collided with a tractor-trailer earlier this year on I-81 in Berkeley County.
Last week, a Berkeley County Grand Jury indicted Donte Thornhill, 29, of Westerly, Rhode Island, on one count of Gross Child Neglect Resulting in Death.
Rhode Island news outlet WPRI said Thornhill was arrested in July following a traffic stop when Rhode Island authorities realized he was wanted out of Berkeley County as a fugitive from justice.
The Berkeley County Sheriff’s Office said that “multiple potential criminal violations” were being considered as part of their investigation into a Jan. 4 crash.
Thornhill had been behind the wheel of a truck that collided with a tractor trailer. Authorities said his young daughter was ejected from the truck and died as a result of her injuries.
“A state medical examiner’s report that indicated the child — Donte Thornhill’s daughter — accidentally died from blunt force trauma to the head and neck,” according to reporting from WPRI.
State police said Thornhill was pulled over on I-95 south in Richmond, Rhode Island, in July for driving with a tinted windshield. He was also given a traffic ticket for driving without his license. Troopers found out there was an active warrant out for his arrest in West Virginia. He was then arrested as a fugitive from justice, arraigned, and ordered held without bail by a judge.
WPRI obtained the criminal complaint from authorities in West Virginia which revealed the case stemmed from the deadly car crash in Berkeley County in January.
Authorities said they performed lifesaving measures on Thornhill’s daughter but she died at the hospital. Medics on scene told the sheriff’s office it was believed that based on the child’s injuries, she had been ejected from Thornhill’s vehicle as a result of the crash.
A check of Thornhill’s vehicle found that “there was evidence to suggest that neither Thornhill nor his daughter were wearing seatbelts at the time of the collision or prior to,” according to the complaint. Authorities also said that there was “an odor of marijuana emitting from the Chevy pickup when in and around the vehicle.”
According to the complaint, Thornhill told authorities that while his daughter was not in a car seat, she was in a seatbelt, “but she wanted to lay down.” In a subsequent conversation at a local hospital, however, Thornhill claimed his daughter was “sitting up” and wearing a seatbelt prior to the crash.
Thornhill allegedly told authorities that he was “going the speed limit,” when the tractor-trailer came up from behind him and struck his vehicle while he was driving in the righthand lane. But the driver of the tractor-trailer told authorities that the driver of the pickup truck, Thornhill, “pulled out directly in front of him,” leaving him unable to react and stop in a timely manner.
According to the investigation, brake marks on the road indicated that the tractor-trailer struck the pickup from behind. However, the marks also appeared to be curved to the left “slightly prior to impact,” which led authorities to believe that the tractor-trailer “was attempting to maneuver and avoid collision by steering left.”
A few days after the crash, authorities spoke with a 911 caller who witnessed the crash. Authorities said the man reported that he was working in his garage when he noticed a vehicle “was pulled off the shoulder” of the interstate, which is adjacent to his home.
When he went to investigate, he said he saw a black Chevy pickup truck with its turn signal on.
“He said the pickup then almost immediately entered the travel lane with virtually no acceleration along the shoulder or building up merging speed, and was abruptly struck by the tractor-trailer,” the complaint stated.
Additionally, the witness said “he knew he needed to go help the occupants as the collision was violent and very bad.” The man rushed to the scene and said he saw the child lying beside the truck outside the rear driver’s side door.
Two weeks after the crash, the sheriff’s office filed a search warrant to obtain data from the airbag control module of Thornhill’s truck, which would shed light on the vehicle’s dynamics both at the time of the crash and five seconds beforehand.
Once authorities were able to download the information, they confirmed that Thornhill was not wearing a seatbelt at the time of the crash and was driving 32 miles per hour. The data did not include information for any occupants in the rear of the vehicle.
Thornhill faces up 15 years behind bars and $5,000 in fines, if convicted.