An 18-year-old Arizona girl, apparently speeding in a sports car, crashed into a motorcycle carrying a former police officer, killing the father of two.
Rachel Berg, 18, drove her new Chevy Corvette at 155 mph on a Mesa freeway around 10:30 p.m. on March 12 when rear-ended a Harley-Davidson driven by Michael Clark, 46, a Tempe park ranger.
The former Tacoma, Washington police officer was thrown from his bicycle in the eastbound HOV lane of US 60, according to local media AZ Family.
Berg stopped and attempted to perform CPR on the fallen motorcyclist, but he died at the scene.
The girl told police she couldn’t stop in time before hitting Clark, according to AZ Family.
According to reports, data from her car’s airbag control module indicated that she had been traveling at 155 mph five seconds before impact and at 87 mph when she hit the bike after hitting the brakes.
Berg was arrested Monday and charged with reckless homicide.
Clark’s wife, Laura, said she wants justice for her husband. “He should have gotten home at 10:45 and I got up at 11:15 and he wasn’t there and I could hear the police helicopter. And he knew it, he knew it. I called him. He did not answer. I sent him a text, but he didn’t read it,” the woman told AZ Family.
“He was a man of service. He served his country and served the Tacoma community. “He was serving Tempe,” she said of her husband of nine years, who became a park ranger six months ago after the couple moved to Mesa.
Clark was a police officer in Tacoma for 14 years before selling his belongings in 2020 and purchasing a mobile home.
“The family is destroyed. I have children who now don’t have a father. The devastation is real and I don’t know how we will ever recover from it. “I don’t know how we put one foot in front of the other again,” the woman added.
Berg’s mother told the outlet that the tragedy has also been hard on her family.
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