This man’s heroic act clouded by dark secret

Players scrambled and parents screamed as the sedan ripped through the baseball field Friday evening.

Spectators in the stands of Goodall Park in Sanford, Maine, watched as the car wheeled down the first base line, hooked right at home plate and gunned for a metal fence leading into the parking lot. The front bumper was careening toward Douglas Parkhurst, 68, and a group of children. Parkhurst, a New York native and Vietnam veteran, moved the kids from the car’s path and attempted to close a gate to keep the sedan in the ballpark when he was struck, authorities told ABC 8.

Parkhurst died on the way to the hospital. The driver, Carol Sharrow, 51, was arrested on suspicion of manslaughter. Authorities would not say why the car was driven at it was, but Sharrow does have two drunken-driving convictions.

The hero’s death that settled around Parkhurst’s end, however, was complicated when the news landed 400 miles to the west in Fulton, New York. There, five years ago, Parkhurst walked into a police station to confess to the 1968 hitand-run death of 4-year-old Carolee Ashby. She was cut down crossing a street on Halloween, prompting cold-case investigators to repeatedly try to identify the driver responsible.

But Parkhurst, who admitted in 2013 that he was behind the wheel of his 1962 Buick after a night of drinking, only came forward after the statute of limitations had run out, The Post-Standard in Syracuse has reported. Parkhurst thus served no time for killing a young girl.

“It feels it has made a full circle,” Ashby’s sister, Darlene Ashby McCann, told the Portland (Maine) Press Herald. “Now I am relieved. I truly am. The same thing that happened to my sister happened to him. …Now it is time to move on.”