Truck driver Bogdan Vechirko, who drove into a crowd of protesters Sunday on the Interstate 35W bridge in Minneapolis, will be released from jail.
His case has been deferred, pending further investigation, Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman announced Tuesday.
Vechirko, 35 of Otsego, was arrested after driving his tanker into a crowd of people who had been protesting for justice for George Floyd, who died in police custody in Minneapolis last week. Vechirko was dragged from his truck by angry protesters and briefly taken to a hospital before being booked into the Hennepin County Jail. No protesters were seriously injured in the incident in the northbound lanes of I-35W at the Mississippi River near downtown.
“From what we can tell from our interviews … we don’t have any information that makes this seem like an intentional act,” Minnesota Public Safety Commissioner John Harrington said previously.
State officials said Vechirko had already been on the freeway system when it started being barricaded ahead of an evening shutdown to quell the civil unrest that had followed Floyd’s death. Officials have said that they do not believe that Vechirko meant to intentionally injure protesters, though he was speeding at the time of the incident.
“He knew the protest was going on, but it doesn’t appear that he was trying to intercept the protest,” Harrington said.
Harrington said that Vechirko “panicked” when he saw the crowd and then slammed on the brakes when he saw a woman on a bicycle fall down in front of him, skidding until the tanker stopped.
According to the Hennepin County attorney’s office, investigators are “in the process of gathering additional information to aid in the charging decision.”
