An Ohio man claimed he didn’t know a tire that rolled off his truck could have killed someone, but that claim was shattered by a year-old jailhouse phone call unearthed by investigators, police said.
According to the Boone County Sheriff’s Office, Lauren Collins, an 18-year-old sophomore studying fashion merchandising at the University of Kentucky, died from injuries sustained when a runaway tire drove over a concrete barrier and through the windshield of her vehicle on Interstate 75 near the Ohio border just after midnight on July 16, 2023.
Six days after the accident, suspect Ricky A. Rader, 37, turned himself in to the Independence Police Department and admitted that “my tire came off on the interstate last weekend, but I didn’t believe the tire hit anyone,” the police department said in a June 21 press release.
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Lauren Collins, 18, was a sophomore merchandising, apparel and textiles major at the University of Kentucky, where she was a member of the school’s Kappa Delta sorority. (Facebook/Lauren Collins)
But phone records obtained by Sergeant Jeff Nagy of the Independence Police Department’s accident reconstruction unit between Rader and a female inmate at the Bullitt County Jail, about 100 miles away, shed light on a different aspect of the crash that led to the driver being criminally charged.
On the night Collins was killed, Rader told a female caller that a tire had come off her 1993 Ford F-250 earlier in the evening, according to a release from the Boone County Sheriff’s Office.
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A runaway tire slammed into the windshield of Collins’ vehicle on Interstate 75 near the Ohio border at approximately 12:15 a.m. on July 16, 2023. Police said she died from her injuries at a nearby hospital. (Facebook/Lauren Collins)
The defendant told the inmate that he “witnessed Collins’ vehicle colliding with his tire” and “knew it was likely that someone would be injured or killed as a result of the collision.”
He said he retrieved the tire, which was stuck on a concrete barrier between the northbound and southbound lanes, attached it to his truck and fled the scene.
Ricky Rader, 37, of Cincinnati, was indicted this month on a felony charge of knowingly leaving the scene of an accident, nearly a year after Collins’ death. (Boone County Sheriff’s Office)
“He stole nuts from other tires to secure the tires and drove them off the highway,” said Maj. Philip Ridgell with the Boone County Sheriff’s Office. Fox 19.
Rader was charged June 4 with leaving the scene of an accident or failure to render aid in an accident resulting in death or serious injury and one count of being a habitual felony offender (first offense), police said.
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He was booked into the Boone County Jail on June 12 and is being held on $40,000 bail, according to online jail records. He requested a public defender during his court appearance on Wednesday, and his next court appearance is scheduled for July 24, Fox 19 reports.
