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Authorities are investigating a newly surfaced video that suggests a woman who hit and killed a man while driving in the Chicago suburb of Zion, Illinois, on Monday night was livestreaming on TikTok at the time of the crash.
The video in question was reportedly taken by a user in Zion, and it shows a woman behind the wheel of a car reacting to a loud thud by saying, “Fuck, fuck, fuck … I just hit somebody.”
According to the Lake and McHenry County Scanner, which first reported on the video, the Zion police department investigations commander, Lt Paul Kehrli, said drugs and alcohol were not suspected of being factors in Monday’s crash, and the driver involved – a 43-year-old woman – remained at the scene to speak with authorities.
The Lake county state’s attorney’s office told the Scanner on Friday afternoon that the agency had been made aware of the video but could not comment further because of a pending investigation. The office stopped short of indicating exactly who made the agency aware of the video.
Studies through the years have attributed cellphone use while driving to an increase in the potential for serious crashes – or worse.
A screen recording of a TikTok live video streamed on Monday was then published on the social media app on Friday morning, and it showed user “Tea_Tyme_3” speaking at her phone before a loud thud. The live stream was quickly disconnected after the thud prompted her to curse, a child to ask what happened and someone else to ask the driver if she was OK.
The user, it has been reported, has since changed her name and made her account private, deleting the biography section in which she had previously described being in Zion, Illinois.
A thread on the Reddit platform separately was started by a user who described seeing the video when it was livestreamed and wondering whether something deadly had happened. News stories later confirmed that user’s worst fears, as the user put it.
“It feels like I accidentally witnessed the moment someone’s life was taken and now I can’t stop thinking about the victim, and how avoidable it was,” the user said. “I just keep replaying that sound in my head.”
The user also said the person driving while on TikTok “wasn’t paying attention to the road because she was reading comments and grinning at her phone”.
“A man died because she wanted attention from a livestream,” the Reddit user also wrote.
Monday’s crash occurred at about 5.30pm, police said. Darren Lucas, 59, of nearby Beach Park, was unresponsive after being hit, and he was later pronounced dead at a hospital emergency room from blunt force injuries inflicted on him by the crash, the local coroner’s office said in a statement.
Lucas’s son-in-law, Chris King, told the Lake and McHenry County Scanner that news of the video made his family “hold our loss tighter to our hearts”.
“We … will continue to pray for what the driver must be going through,” King reportedly said. “We are trying to find our ways to live, without someone we cherished so much.”
