The family of the 23-year-old woman crushed and killed by a drunk driver in a monster truck outside of a Dallas strip club last month is suing the cage fight-managing truck's owner, the driver, the strip club's managers, and the strip club itself over the death.
A recently-filed discovery petition in a North Texas District Court released to Jalopnik this morning brings some more details to this tragic case, including the state of the driver and the condition of the vehicle he was attempting to drive when the accident occurred.
We already knew that at approximately 2 a.m. recent college graduate Kasey McKenzie of Granbury, Texas was walking across the parking lot of the Spearmint Rhino gentelmen's club with some friends when 27-year-old Oklahoma resident Eric Brent Crutchfield in a lifted Ford F-250 ran over the young woman unknowingly. After a field sobriety test Crutchfield was taken into custody and charged with intoxication manslaughter.
The petition claims the vehicle wasn't owned by Crutchfield but by Kenneth Nair and was built as a promotional show truck for a his company Freestyle Cage Fighting.
They allege that the vehicle wasn't street legal because the headlights were 72 inches above the ground, which is 18 inches above Federal and State regulations. It goes on to claim Crutchfield had a suspended license and was thus not legally able to drive the vehicle.
"Combined with the truck's dark tinted windows, these factors would have made it extremely difficult for an intoxicated driver to see Ms. McKenzie, who was only 5 feet 3 inches tall," said attorney Michael E. Schmidt, who represents the McKenzie family.
Most disturbingly, the petition for discovery claims the truck ran over McKenzie with both the front and rear tires and, though pronounced dead at the scene, she survived the initial collision (allowing her parents to sue for both pain-and-suffering on behalf of themselves and their daughter).
The rest of the document details the case against Spearmint Rhino, which lawyers for the family claim served Crutchfield beyond the point he was drunk and improperly trained staff. Whether this is part of the fishing expedition or the lawyers have information backing up this claim is unclear.
You can read the full document above.
Photo Credit: Robert Flagg/Dallas News