Alabama
Pursuit-related deaths per 100K: 5.3
Pursuit-related deaths (1996-2015): 243 (9th highest)
Violent crimes per 100K (2015): 472.4 (10th highest)
Bystander deaths (1996-2015): 55 (16th highest)
Police Pursuit Crashes Kill the Innocent and Officers
Excerpt from The Atlanta Journal's news story:
Authorities continued to try to piece together details of a collision that, a day earlier killed six occupants of a van that truck driver Elmer G. Milteer slammed into following a high speed chase that led police on a 20-mile chase from a weigh-in station in Georgia to an open stretch of I-20 near Coldwater, Alabama. Killed were William Joyner, 53, and his wife, Annie Lou Joyner, 44, both of nearby Bynum. Their son, Ryan Jason Joyner, 5, died en route to a Birmingham hospital. Others killed included Mrs. Joyner's aunt, Mary Bannister Garms, 68, her granddaughter, Regina Lynn Foster, 16. Another passenger, Patricia Kay Prudoehl, 18, of St. Charles, Minn., became the crash's sixth fatality when she died Sunday afternoon at the University of Alabama in Birmingham Hospital.
They had been to breakfast at Shoney's, a family affair, and were heading back home in William Joyner's new red and white Chevrolet van when the police cars came rushing up from the rear.
Joyner pulled over to the side of Interstate 20 and stopped, less than half a mile from the exit he would have taken.
Sitting beside him, Steve Foster glanced in the rear-view mirror. And in a blur of blue lights and sirens, he saw the truck.
"I knew it was going to hit us. He was coming up so fast, straight at us, and we were sitting there at a dead stop.
"I had my seat belt on and I wanted to undo it and jump out, but by the time I even reached for the buckle, he hit us and I was through the window," Foster said Sunday, as authorities continued to piece together details of a collision a day earlier that killed six occupants of the van, including Joyner. Foster, who was injured, was the lone survivor among the van's occupants.
Authorities said a truck driver from New York led law officers on a 20-mile chase from a weigh-in station in Georgia to an open stretch of I-20 near this east Alabama town.
(Send photos or more information on the Joyner, Garms, Foster, and Prudoehl families, to candypriano@kristieslaw.org.