killed
Tuesday
By BOB HIGH
A 79-year-old Tabor City woman riding a three-wheel bicycle was instantly killed early Tuesday afternoon near her home when her vehicle was struck from behind by a man driving at 50 mph on Minos Meares Road near the rear entrance to South Columbus High School.
Trudy Jacobs Irwin Walker was pedaling west on the edge of the road at 12:40 p.m. and was hit by a 1988 Oldsmobile driven by Elroy Givens, 62, of Dothan Road, Tabor City, according to a Highway Patrol report.
Trooper John Lewis said Walker, a former bookkeeper for Simmons and Mast drugstores in Whiteville, had been riding her three-wheel bicycle with two other women who had gone ahead of her and were not near the scene of the crash.
Walker was thrown into the air by the force of the crash and into Givens’ windshield before landing 110 feet from the point of impact. Her bicycle was thrown 104 feet from the impact on the edge of the road.
“Her death was instantaneous. She never knew what happened,” Lewis noted.
Givens told Lewis that he turned his head to look at a house along Minos Meares Road and when he looked back to the road Walker and her three-wheel bicycle were in his path on the long straight open stretch of road, the trooper said.
Givens was charged with misdemeanor death by a motor vehicle.
Walker’s death is the second highway fatality within five days of Tabor City residents, and the seventh of the year in Columbus County, all of them from rural crashes. Four of the seven victims have been Tabor City residents.
Harry James Workinger, 61, of Tabor City, was killed last Friday when he crashed into a camper trailer after he failed to stop his motorcycle at a stop sign on Reynolds Road at the intersection with Peacock Road east of Tabor City.
Angela “Ann” Worley Strickland, 49, of Sidney-Cherry Grove Road, Tabor City, was killed Feb. 2 when she ejected from her Jeep after she ran off the road into a driveway and ditch on the way to her nearby mother’s home which was on fire.
And, Patrick Dewayne Nayle, 30, of Tabor City, died on Feb. 4 when he was thrown from his overturning car after it left N.C. Highway 904 at a high rate of speed.
Highway fatalities in 2005 numbered eight for the same time period, and the 2004 total through May 2 was six. (See photos Page 4-A of the printed edition and Obituary Page)