5 teens charged with murder after man killed by rock tossed from bridge

Five teenagers in Michigan, accused of killing a man with a 6-pound rock hurled from an overpass on a school night last week, were denied bail Tuesday after being charged with seconddegree murder.

The Genesee County Sheriff ’s Office said Ken White, 32, a father of four, was driving on Interstate 75 near Flint on Wednesday, headed home from a construction job, when a rock shattered his windshield and struck his chest and head, breaking his skull and clavicle. An autopsy ruled the cause of death was blunt force trauma.

“It’s not a prank; it’s seconddegree murder,” Sheriff Robert Pickell said at a news conference Monday.

Genesee County Prosecutor David Leyton accused the teenagers of “a willful and wanton act that resulted in somebody’s death.” Leyton said they will be tried as adults.

The teenagers range in age from 15 to 17 and all attend the same high school in the city of Clio, 15 miles north of Flint. At an arraignment hearing Tuesday morning, all five pleaded not guilty to the charges, which included conspiracy to commit murder and multiple counts of malicious destruction of property. The murder charge carries a maximum sentence of life in prison.

Pickell described a night of mayhem in which the five young men threw at least 20 rocks, a car tire and a piston into oncoming traffic from two separate bridges. Several vehicles were reportedly damaged in the barrage, though no one else was injured or killed.

The teens ended their evening with a fast-food dinner, Pickell said.

Similar episodes have menaced highways around the country for decades. In 1991, Karen Zentner, 22, was killed when a man pushed a 52-pound boulder onto her car from a bridge in New Paltz, N.Y..

In 1996, a 46-year-old Austin woman was killed when a rock thrown from an Interstate 20 overpass in Fort Worth struck her in the head.

And in 2014, Sharon Budd of Uniontown, Ohio, suffered permanent brain damage and required several facial reconstruction surgeries when she was struck by a rock while driving under an overpass in Pennsylvania.