Charges filed in hit-and-run

FOUR WERE KILLED IN WISCONSIN CRASH SATURDAY

Vehicular homicide charges were filed Tuesday against a 21-year-old man accused of inhaling chemical vapours before he crashed his truck into a group of Girl Scouts picking up trash along a highway, killing three children and one adult, Wisconsin prosecutors said Tuesday.

The 11 charges filed against Colten Treu include four counts of vehicular homicide and four counts of a hit-andrun resulting in death. The punishment for those charges alone is up to 160 years in prison.

The criminal complaint prosecutors released describe a struggle for the steering wheel between Treu and the passenger in his truck shortly before the vehicle veered off the road and struck the Girl Scout troop working in ditches along the highway in Lake Hallie, a town about 95 miles east of Minneapolis. Treu and his passenger later told investigators they had been huffing from a computer keyboard cleaner they’d purchased that day.

The Saturday crash killed nine-year-old Jayna Kelley and 10-year-old Autum Helgeson, both of Lake Hallie, and 10year-old Haylee Hickle and her mother, 32-year-old mother, Sara Jo Schneider, from the Town of Lafayette.

A sheriff’s deputy investigating the accident traced a fluid trail that led to the house where Treu lived with the truck’s passenger, according to the complaint. The passenger, who has not been arrested or charged, told police he grabbed the steering wheel when he saw that Treu “looked out of it” and that the truck was crossing over the road’s centre line. The passenger said Treu yelled at him for touching the steering wheel before crossing the centre line again, this time going into the ditch, according to the complaint.

Treu is being held on $250,000 bond.

Treu told investigators he never passed out and that his passenger “was huffing a lot more than him,” according to the complaint. He said he “lost control of the vehicle and fishtailed” after his passenger grabbed the steering wheel.