Daytona Beach, FL - Criminal charges likely won't be filed after a woman is killed by a City of Daytona Beach public works vehicle early this morning on beachside.
That's the word from Daytona Beach Police Department Chief Craig Capri during a press conference this morning at DBPD headquarters on Valor Boulevard.
The woman who died is 34-year-old Dawn Klenk, a homeless woman with family who lives in the area, per Capri.
It happened just after 3 o'clock this morning on State Road A1A near Main Street, just west of the Daytona Beach Pier.
"It appears, at this point in time, the driver of the vehicle did not know that he hit somebody," Capri added. "It appears that the vehicle ran over the victim."
Capri would not identify the driver, but did say that the driver hasn't been working with the city for that long and that he's "torn up" over what happened.
"It's highly possible that the driver - and I'm very confident [of this] - did not know that he had hit somebody," Capri said. "He didn't know that he had hit anybody [until he got back to city yards]."
Investigators think Klenk was lying on the road and that the driver - who was in what Capri called a flatbed-style dump truck - would have had a difficult time seeing her because of how high the driver sits in that vehicle and the lighting in the area.
"It's possible the victim [had fallen] in the street prior to that or was intoxicated from what we're hearing from witness reports," Capri noted, adding later on that Klenk had a history of drug and alcohol abuse.
DBPD wouldn't release video gathered from nearby traffic cameras and area businesses showing the incident right now, citing the active investigation, but Capri did note that Klenk wasn't in the crosswalk at the time she was killed.
"It was just an unfortunate accident," Capri noted. "Accidents happen. I feel bad for the victim and her family at this point in time and I'm more concerned about them right now, to be honest with you."
