Metropolitan police are investigating an incident in which a driver participating in the so-called “People Convoy” allegedly struck a pedestrian in D.C. as the right-wing convoy drove through the city on Sunday afternoon.
According to an incident report obtained and reviewed by The Daily Beast on Monday, Dupont Circle resident Kerry Lynn Bedard told D.C. police she was on the west side of the 1600 block of Connecticut Ave NW “when [the convoy member] struck her with his vehicle and drove on top of her right ankle.”
For his part, the convoy member, Donald Bryan Thomas II of Butler, Ohio, who was driving a silver BMW 550i plastered with stickers like “TRUCKERS RULE!!! MSM LIES,” claimed to police that he was merely “driving forward slowly when [Bedard] walked into the street and in front of his vehicle while yelling and then laid down in the roadway.” Thomas couldn’t be reached for comment on Monday evening.
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“This is currently an ongoing investigation,” Metro PD Public Information Office Sean Hickman told The Daily Beast. “If anyone has any information, please call 202-727-9099 or text 50411.”
One eyewitness to the incident—a local DJ in the area—told The Daily Beast that “the lady [Bedard] went between the cars as her own form of protest yelling at them and said the driver of the BMW was at a full stop and then hit the gas (low speed but enough to knock into her).”
“She was much older and had trouble standing up,” added the witness, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “I went over to see if she needed help or water or something, and he [Thomas] was yelling at her to ‘get the fuck up.’”
The witness recalled that Bedard was “laying on the street” and that a gathering crowd worried the driver might attempt to further move “his car towards her again.” The tensions only worsened, he said, as the driver allegedly laid on his horn while the woman stayed on the ground.
“I was assaulted with a deadly weapon,” Bedard, an outspoken member of the community, told The Daily Beast late Monday. “It was a car that was in that convoy of truckers,” she continued, adding that the incident occured after her lunch outing at Zorba’s Café nearby.
While the convoy driver essentially claimed Bedard walked into his car, the D.C. resident claimed to The Daily Beast that she was struck “intentionally” and now has “two broken bones” in her leg.
“I have two witnesses that saw that he [Thomas] was at a standstill for quite a while, and the convoy was not moving,” she said, “while trying to get his attention to open the window,” all in an attempt to broker a conversation about not disrupting a “peaceful neighborhood.”
