Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Motorist charged in activist’s death
Preliminary hearing for Michael Larkin of Marple set for January
EAST GOSHEN » Sixteen minutes after police were dispatched to the report of a crash involving a bicyclist in the lush horse country of Willistown on a mid-July evening, a police officer spoke with a man driving a white Mercedes who was stopped in traffic at the scene.
Easttown Officer Jesse Emmons approached the car and directed the driver — who another motorist said had been seen on two separate occasions before coming in contact with police — to turn his car around because the stretch of road was blocked by emergency personnel attending to the man who had been gravely injured in the crash.
“OK,” said the Mercedes driver. “Thank you.”
What Emmons did not know is that the man in the E350 convertible was in fact the driver who had collided with the bicyclist approximately 20 minutes earlier. The man had no other conversation with Emmons, and made no attempt to notify him of his involvement in the incident, according to a recitation of the matter included in court records.
Last week, after a four-month
investigation into the crash that killed 64-year-old Michael Hackman, a pioneer in the fight against homelessness in Chester County who dedicated his life to helping the less fortunate through a wide variety of non-profit efforts, authorities charged that driver, Delaware County resident Michael Larkin, for waiting more than three hours to acknowledge the role he had played in Hackman’s death.
Larkin, 38, of Marple, was charged with a felony count of accidents involving death or personal injury, the criminal charge for those incidents commonly known as “hit and run” accidents.
The charge makes it a crime not to stop immediately, or as soon as possible, after having been in an accident to report the matter and render aid to anyone injured. If convicted, Larkin would face the possibility of a maximum prison sentence of five to 10 years, although the actual punishment would likely be far less given his lack of a prior record.
He was arraigned on Tuesday by Magisterial District Judge Thomas Tartaglio of East Goshen and released on unsecured $20,000 bail. Larkin’s attorney, Arthur Donato of Media, told Tartaglio in requesting nominal bail that his client had long known of the investigation into his involvement in the crash and had made no attempt to flee.
“If he was going to go anywhere, he would have done so by now,” said Donato, who represents Larkin along with criminal defense attorney Peter Kratsa of the West Chester law firm of MacElree Harvey, in standing up for his client. “He is not a threat to the community, and the nature and circumstances of the are open to interpretation.”
Larkin, a lifelong resident of Delaware County and an administrator with the Marple Newtown School District, did not address the court at his arraignment except to answer Tartaglio’s questions about whether he understood the nature of the criminal proceedings against him. He had arrived for the brief hearing with his attorneys voluntarily at the request of Willistown police.
Hackman’s death shook the social service community when it was reported after the crash because of his much-admired work on behalf of the less fortunate in the county and beyond.
“It is difficult to put into words this unimaginable tragedy,” said John Crosby, one of the founders of the organization that Hackman helped run in recent years, the Uncommon Individual Foundation in Devon. “He was an indispensable part of our work, and it will be impossible to think about replacing him.”
In a statement issued at the time, county Commissioners Marian Moskowitz, Josh Maxwell, and Michelle Kichline on Tuesday paid tribute to Hackman’s life of service.
“We are saddened to hear of the tragic passing of Michael Hackman,” the statement
read. “He worked tirelessly in our Department of Community
Development to end chronic homelessness through the Decades to Doorways program. Our deepest condolences are with his family, his friends and co-workers, and the many people who are no longer homeless because of his passion and dedication.”
But at 7:30 p.m. on July 18, he was just another county resident out for some exercise on his bicycle on Providence Road, riding past the fields of the Radnor Hunt Club in Willistown and the adjacent White Manor Country Club, pedaling towards his home in Paoli, where he lived with his wife, Charlene.
According to a criminal complaint filed in the case by Willistown Sgt., Stephen Jones, around 7:48 p.m., a motorist called police dispatch to say she had come across a cyclist’s body along the road in the 800 block of Providence Road. A Willistown officer arrived at the scene eight minutes later, and spoke with the woman as he tended to the victim, who was badly inured. The woman said she had seen no other cars in the area when she arrived.
Two others who came upon Hackman, a couple who had been having a family dinner at a home on nearby Hunt Club Lane, said they did not recall seeing any cars coming toward them as they drove east on Providence Road before coming to the crash scene. The woman passenger, who was with her husband, said no one there identified themselves as being involved in the crash.
But the woman told investigators that one motorist had returned to the area twice while she was directing traffic around the scene. She said she told the man, driving a white convertible with the top down matching Larkin’s Mercedes, that there had been a “bad accidefnt” and that the road was blocked. The man, who fit Larkin’s appearance, turned around and drove away west on Providence Road, she said.
Some time later, the woman spotted the car again in a line of traffic behind her husband’s car that was parked in the roadway. The driver asked if the accident was bad and she told him it was serious. But the driver did not say anything about being involved in the crash, nor did he get out and try to provide assistance to Hackman.
Personnel from Malvern Ambulance Company arrived on the scene around 7:57 p.m., and left with Hackman’s body at 8:12 p.m. He was declared dead at Paoli Hospital at 8:47 p.m.
Meanwhile, officers from the Chester County Serious Crash Assistance team began investigating the incident, which they believed involved a motorist hitting the cyclist. They could find no one who witnessed the accident or could say anything about the other vehicle.
But at 10:38 p.m., Donato contacted county police radio and said he had a client who was “probably the person who hit the person” on Providence Road, and that he was waiting to speak with officers. Donato said he had instructed his client to wait at the intersection of Hunt Club Lane and Providence Road for police. But prior to that time, two officers, Detective Robert Will and Chief Robert Klinger, had been at the intersection and had not seen Larkin or his car, the complaint states.
When police eventually made contact with Larkin, they observed damage to the front passenger side hood and headlight. His blood was later tested and found to have no alcohol present, but did had traces of prescription sedatives.
Larkin, accompanied by a family friend, told the officers then that he was driving west on Providence after picking up takeout food from a local restaurant when he struck something, “possibly a deer.” But he said when he looked in his rearview mirror, he saw a bicycle in the middle of the road. At some point, he said he went back to the area and saw police and emergency personnel on the scene, but did not get out of his car or call 9-1-1. Records show that would have been just before 8 p.m., approximately 15 minutes after the crash.
In his explanation of the events, Larkin told police that he tried to speak with an Easttown officer about his involvement in the crash, but that he was “turned around” by police. That would have been the encounter with Emmons at 8:04 p.m., which was captured on body camera video and does not indicate that he tried to notify Emmons about what had happened, the complaint states.
Larkin also told police that he had spoken with fire police officers at the scene, whoa advised him to get back in hid car and wait for police to contact him. But the fire police, who said Larkin approached them around 8:30 p.m. at the intersection of Providence Road and Warren Avenue about ¼ mile from the accident scene, told investigators he did not explain his involvement in the crash. He did not approach any of the police who were in the area at the time, they said.
Later, after he spoke with Larkin, Will, one of the original investigators, drove back to Hunt Club Lane, the wooded cul-de-sac where Larkin had been told to wait for police. There, outside the address of Larkin’s family friend, he observed condensation of the roadway that Jones’ complaint states is consistent with where a running vehicle had been parked.
When investigators checked Larkin’s phone records, they found no indication that he ever called police to report the crash. They also showed he had not called Donato — a veteran Delaware County criminal defense attorney who is also defending another case of a motorist, Margaret Gallagher of Haverford, who failed to stop after striking a pedestrian on West Chester Pike in Willistown — until 9:50 p.m., over two hours after the crash and about 50 minutes before Donato alerted police to Larkin’s involvement.
A preliminary hearing on the matter had been scheduled before Tartaglio at 11:30 a.m. Jan. 13.