Update (May 1, 2025): Authorities have identified the woman who was killed in this accident at Marina Vasconcelos, a 24-year-old graduate student from North East, MD. The man who was driving the van that hit her has been charged with second-degree murder.
Newark, DE — April 29, 2025, one person was killed and seven others were injured in a rental van accident at about 4:30 p.m. on East Main Street.
Authorities said police were investigating a U-Haul van that was overdue in being returned to a rental facility when two people got in the van and fled. The speeding van hit two pedestrians and several parked vehicles before it was disabled near Haines Street.
One of the pedestrians died at the scene of the crash, while the other was seriously injured, according to authorities. Both have been identified only as University of Delaware students at this time.
Six other people suffered non-life-threatening injuries, authorities said. Three were hospitalized and three were treated at the scene.
The van driver and a passenger were arrested after the crash, but it is not clear what charges they will face at this time.
Authorities have not released any additional information about the crash. The incident is still under investigation.
Commentary by Attorney Michael Grossman
This crash in Newark is a stark reminder that not every commercial vehicle on the road is being operated by someone with the training, or even the legal authority, to be behind the wheel. A U-Haul van may not look like an 18-wheeler, but it carries many of the same risks when misused: limited visibility, high momentum and the potential to cause mass injury in a short span of time. When that kind of vehicle is used in a reckless attempt to flee police, the outcome is rarely anything short of disastrous.
Legally, this isn’t just a crash. It’s the end result of a chain of decisions that appear to have ignored every basic principle of safety and responsibility. Someone chose to operate a heavy commercial vehicle they had no right to be in. They chose to flee, allegedly at high speed, through a densely populated college town. And in doing so, they killed one pedestrian, critically injured another and hurt six more people, some of whom were bystanders who likely never saw the danger coming.
From a legal and safety perspective, one key question is whether anything could have been done earlier to prevent this vehicle from being taken or used in the way it was. U-Haul vehicles are often treated as temporary conveniences, but when someone uses one to flee police and ends up killing a pedestrian, it raises serious concerns about access control, tracking and the role of private companies in preventing misuse. These aren’t theoretical concerns when the vehicle involved can weigh over 10,000 pounds when loaded.
There’s also a deeper issue here about public risk. Urban corridors like East Main Street are filled with foot traffic, parked cars and people who expect a certain baseline of safety. That expectation vanishes the moment a large vehicle is turned into a battering ram by someone with no concern for who gets in the way. And when that kind of recklessness ends in death, as it did here, the accountability has to go beyond just criminal charges. It has to look at every system that failed to keep the public safe, because lives were lost in the space between “this van is overdue” and “someone just got killed.”
Ultimately, this wasn’t a traffic incident. It was a breakdown of judgment and responsibility, carried out in a vehicle that never should have been on the road under those conditions. And when a student is killed while walking near campus because someone turned a rental van into a weapon, the question that has to be answered is: how many chances did someone have to stop this before it reached the point of no return? Because the consequences, for one young life and many others, are irreversible.
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