Marshall Dorian
RALEIGH, N.C. — Two men who stopped to help a trucker stranded in the snow were killed by a hit-and-run driver on Thursday night, state authorities charged. The State Highway Patrol has arrested a North Carolina man on murder, drug and impaired-driving charges.
The deaths came at the end of a winter storm that made roads dangerous for days. A Clayton trucker driving the cab of a tractor-trailer had hit a patch of fresh snow and spun out of control on westbound Interstate 40 near the U.S. 70 Bypass at about 8 p.m. The driver put out reflectors and tried to move his truck to safety, but two cars soon swerved off the right side of the highway to avoid him.
Nathaniel Williams, 34, climbed from his crashed car up the embankment to the stopped tractor-trailer. Larry Kepley, 39, parked his own tractor-trailer on the westbound side of the highway and got out to help.
Williams and Kepley were standing behind the cab when a fourth vehicle, a 2001 Volvo, came down the road. The Volvo struck both men and then drove off, according to the Department of Public Safety. Both men – Kepley, of Winston-Salem, and Nathaniel Williams, a Missouri native living in Hope Mills – were killed by the collision, according to state authorities.
Emergency responders in cars and a helicopter establshed a perimeter and began to hunt for the Volvo’s driver. Authorities say they found the suspect, Marshall H. Doran, 21, of Kure Beach, hiding in a wooded area before he turned himself over to a Wake County sheriff’s deputy.
Doran was arrested at Trailwood and Lineberry drives near I-40 and Lake Wheeler Road, south of downtown Raleigh, shortly after 9 p.m., an arrest report stated.
