Butler County sheriff’s deputy injured while responding to crash on bridge

ajc.com

Credit: Nick Graham

Credit: Nick Graham

A Butler County sheriff’s deputy was injured when a vehicle rear-ended his cruiser as he responded to a crash on an icy bridge today.

Deputy Shawn Petty was sitting in his cruiser on Ohio 129’s William R. Foster Bridge around 7 a.m. responding to a crash that had occurred 20 minutes earlier, according to Sgt. Jeff Schuster of the sheriff’s office. A vehicle heading east moved over a lane as required by law and things quickly went awry.

“The back end of (the passing motorist’s) vehicle slid out from behind him, he hit the retaining wall and the bridge and kind of slid along and then his passenger side impacted the back of the deputy’s cruiser and kind of pinwheeled around him,” Schuster told this news outlet this afternoon.

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Petty was taken to West Chester Hospital and later released, he said.

“He’s sore,” Schuster said. “It was just kind of overall general achiness and soreness. He heard … the vehicle hit the wall and he looked up in his rear-view mirror and he had enough time to kind of tense up.”

The sheriff’s office shut down both directions of Ohio 129 following the incident, one of several crashes deputies responded to along the roadway this morning.

Schuster said it was “literally a solid sheet of ice” at the bridge, which spans Gregory Creek.

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The roads around the bridge are typically safe when temperatures dip into the low 30s, Schuster said, but because the bridge is 200 to 300 feet off the ground, it can freeze over even during the slightest bit of adverse weather.

“Pretty much anytime we have any kind of cold weather and a little bit of snow or sleet we always problems up there,” he said.

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