Hatfield man charged in fatal hit-and-run of 83-year-old
Police arrested a Hatfield man they said fatally struck an 83-year-old man with his van and drove off.
A Hatfield man has been charged in the hit-and-run death of an 83-year-old man who was struck and killed by a van as he walked along Oak Park Road near his home last year, authorities said Friday.
Nicholas Shaw, 26, was charged with multiple crimes for fatally hitting Linford Michener last October, then failing to stop to render aid, the Montgomery County District Attorney’s Office said in a statement.
He was arraigned Thursday and released on $10,000 unsecured bail.
In an email, Shaw’s attorney Matthew Wilkov expressed sympathy for the Michener family, but declined further comment.
On Oct. 27, 2022, authorities said, Hatfield Police and first responders arrived at Oak Park Road in Hatfield to find Michener lying in a drainage ditch by the road. Michener was unresponsive and was taken to Abington Lansdale Hospital, where he was pronounced dead less than an hour later.
At autopsy showed that Michener died from blunt impact injuries, which a doctor said were consistent with being hit by a car.
Investigators learned that Michener had been walking along the road to a fenced-in part of the back of his property while his wife was weeding another part of their property and heard the crash, authorities said.
Surveillance footage from a neighbor’s property showed an Econoline van with white ladder racks on the roof and a North Penn School District logo on the passenger door. That led investigators to a secure lot at the North Penn School District facilities.
There, investigators found a van that matched the images on surveillance footage. The vehicle had damage to the hood and passenger side, authorities said. School records showed that Shaw, a groundskeeper for the school district, had been using the van. At the time of the crash, officials said, he was supposed to be cutting grass at Pennfield Middle School.
The school is approximately 1.5 miles from the scene of the crash.
Additional surveillance footage showed Shaw getting into the van, which had no visible damage, minutes before Michener was struck and killed, the District Attorney’s Office said in a statement. Shortly after, the statement said, Shaw was seen driving the van back into a school district parking lot, and the vehicle had fresh damage to the hood and passenger side of the vehicle.