Lawyers: Driver had a problem
Say Zhukovskyy needed 3 doses of Narcan after previous crash
Volodymyr Zhukovskyy needed three doses of Narcan from Agawam first responders to come back from a heroin overdose just a month before his truck crash that killed seven bikers last June in New Hampshire, newly filed court documents reveal.
The papers in Zhukovskyy’s homicide case also detail his alleged admission to police that heroin was a factor in his semi-tractortrailer rollover in Texas 18 days before the New Hampshire accident.
“Well, I mean I do heroin,” Zhukovskyy allegedly told investigators of the Texas crash while being interviewed about the New Hampshire crash. “… I always like to do it like once in a while, and I got in an accident before this. Before this accident I flipped my truck in Texas.”
The details were laid out in separate motions to admit evidence, filed in the past week in Coos County Superior Court. Zhukovskyy, facing 23 charges, is currently awaiting trial in a New Hampshire lockup.
On May 5, 2019, first responders in Agawam attended to an unresponsive Zhukovskyy found lying on his back in a parking lot by giving him two doses of intranasal Narcan and a third dose intravenously.
“The first responders found the defendant lying on the ground, blue in the face, with a weak pulse and fixed pinpoint pupils,” Coos County
prosecutors wrote.
Once he became responsive, Zhukovskyy allegedly confessed he snorted three bags of what he believed to be heroin.
Jay Duguay, Zhukovskyy’s public defender, asked a judge last week to allow Zhukovskyy an extended deadline to respond to the motions.
Additional filings detail witness accounts of Zhukovskyy driving his pickup truck and flatbed trailer erratically hours before the New Hampshire accident.
Nicholas Belanger, an employee at Berlin City Auto Group, allegedly saw Zhukovskyy drive at an excessive speed into the business’s lot, prompting Belanger to comment about the truck to a customer.
“After seeing a press release about the crash, Mr. Belanger identified the truck and trailer involved in the deaths of the motorcyclists as the same he watched leaving the dealership like ‘a bat out of hell,'” prosecutors wrote.
Westfield Transport, the since-disbanded trucking company that employed Zhukovskyy, is locked in a federal lawsuit with its insurance company and victims of the accident over $1 million in funds to be distributed.
Three wrongful death suits against Westfield Transport and Zhukovskyy are also pending in New Hampshire and Massachusetts courts.