MESQUITE — A motorcycle rider was killed after he became separated from his bike and slid across two lanes, then was struck by a semitractor-trailer on Interstate 15 in Mesquite, Nev., Saturday night.
Shortly after 10 p.m., officers and emergency personnel were dispatched to an incident involving a motorcycle crash that began on southbound I-15 near mile marker 122 in Nevada.
Responders arrived to find the unidentified rider on the northbound side of the interstate. He was pronounced dead at the scene, Mesquite Fire Captain Spencer Lewis said.
At the time of the crash, the rider was heading south on I-15 when he went off the roadway into the median and laid the bike down, Lewis said. At that point, the impact ripped the helmet off the rider, who became separated from the bike.
The bike ended up near the southbound side of the interstate while the rider slid more than 20 feet into the outside lane of northbound I-15, where a secondary crash occurred, Lewis said, and the rider was struck by a semitractor-trailer heading north.
“So he slid through the median and then across both lanes of travel,” Lewis said. “When he finally stopped, he ended up in the slow lane where that secondary accident occurred with the semi.”
The impact that ripped the rider’s helmet from his head was sufficient to have killed him, Lewis added, so he was likely deceased before he was struck by the semi. The truck was coming around a “blind curve,” he said, this left the truck driver with very little time, if any, to react.
“With the rider sliding that far with his helmet was ripped off,” Lewis said, “it’s highly unlikely that he was still living when that happened.”
Lewis did not have any information on the man’s age or what caused him to lay the bike down in the first place, adding that the crash investigation was turned over to the Nevada Highway Patrol.
Northbound I-15 was reduced to a single travel lane to allow responders to tend to the scene and conduct a crash investigation while the family of the victim has been notified by authorities.
The crash investigation is ongoing and no further details were available at the time of this report.
Copyright St. George News, SaintGeorgeUtah.com LLC, 2019, all rights reserved.