Candidate says he is involved in fatal crash

Charlie Gerow cooperating with investigators in turnpike crash

Charlie Gerow, a Republican who announced his run for governor last month, has acknowledged that he is cooperating with a police investigation into a fatal crash involving a motorcyclist, and that shut down the Pennsylvania Turnpike through Chester County for seven hours.

Gerow apparently drove for several miles with the motorcycle stuck to the front of his car, according to a witness. In a statement through a spokesperson, Gerow said he did not cause the accident and he was not injured.

On Monday, Gerow’s local lawyer stated that the Republican commentator does not appear to have hit the motorcyclist who was killed on the Pennsylvania Turnpike last week, and it appears the motorcycle was lying in the road when Gerow hit it, impaling it on his car.

In addition, Gerow was not driving impaired, criminal defense attorney Joseph P. Green Jr. of West Chester said, and an attendee at the political fundraiser Gerow had been attending in suburban Philadelphia the night of the incident said she did not see him drinking and that he seemed sober when he left.

Pennsylvania State Police have released little information about the accident Wednesday night just before 10 p.m., saying only that it involved a motorcycle and a car that a Gerow spokesperson identified as the one Gerow was driving.

The turnpike was closed for seven hours after the accident in the westbound lanes near the Route 29 exit in Charlestown, just west of the King of Prussia interchange, police said in a news release.

The county Coroner’s Office identified the victim as Logan Carl Abbott, 30, of Bradford County. The cause of death is multiple blunt impacts and toxicology tests on the victim are pending, Coroner Dr. Christina VandePol said.

It is not clear whether other vehicles were involved, or how the accident happened. Green contended in his statement that “preliminary information” suggests the motorcyclist was involved in a collision with another vehicle first and that Gerow hit his disabled motorcycle lying in the road.

A highway construction worker reportedly said he was working on the turnpike’s eastbound lanes Wednesday night when he saw a Mercedes pass by with a motorcycle wedged into its grill.

The worker, Nicholas Forgette, who works for a traffic control company in Pottstown, said sparks were flying from the car and that it was traveling at a high rate of speed. He and his crew, he said, watched in disbelief.

“It was a big motorcycle, too,” Forgette said. “There were a bunch of sparks. And it was very loud.”

As construction workers moved down the highway, Forgette said he saw that state police had pulled over the Mercedes several miles after where he had first seen it drive by with the motorcycle still attached.

The motorcycle “was sitting upright, with the side stuck into the front of the car,” Forgette said.

Gerow, 66, runs a communications and marketing firm in Harrisburg with offices two blocks from the state Capitol, where he is a familiar face.

In the statement, Gerow said he “looks forward to the State Police completing their investigation and is confident that the investigation will confirm that he was not the cause (of) the accident.”

At the fundraiser at a private residence in Ambler, Montgomery County’s Republican Party chair, Liz Preate Havey, said Gerow seemed “stone sober” when he left and that nobody she talked to at the event had seen him drinking there.

This is Gerow’s first statewide campaign after running unsuccessfully for Congress and the state Legislature in the past.

Before he announced his candidacy in June, Gerow had toured the state GOP’s event circuit for months, speaking to audiences as a potential candidate.

He is vice chairman of the American Conservative Union, a national political organization, and a rankand-file state party committee member. He got his start in politics volunteering — and later as a paid staffer — on the presidential campaigns of Ronald Reagan.

He is also known to Sunday morning television audiences in central Pennsylvania for appearing for more than two decades as a political commentator on “Face the State,” a public affairs show on the local CBS

affiliate.