Last Thursday night, on Highway 12 in the eastern part of Santa Rosa, there was a deadly accident involving a sports utility vehicle (SUV) and a motorcycle.
The driver of the SUV is being sought for as the accident fatally killed Brian Michael Johnson, a 34 year-old resident of Sonoma.
After the accident happened at 8 pm near Calistoga, the police closed the intersection so the police could question witnesses and closely examined the scene of the accident. The body lay near by, covered with a yellow tarp. The police rested the motorcycle against a raised concrete median.
Sgt. Ryan Corcoran, a police officer at the scene, thinks that the SUV driver left the scene without stopping and went east on the highway. As of late Thursday, the police had still not found the mysterious SUV driver.
A witness named Antonio Harris, a resident of Santa Rosa, said he had seen the motorcycle smash into the median. Harris believed that the motorcyclist increased his speed so he could get through the stop light before it turned red.
After seeing the motorcycle lose control, Harris ran to the nearby shopping center market to call 911. While he was on the phone, he saw the SUV hit the motorcyclist who had been lying on the road after being thrown from his motorcycle.
This is the fourth fatality in a car crash and it is unusual for Santa Rosa as this city only experiences four to five deaths per year in car accidents.
