Three months after the hit-and-run accident that claimed the life of college and preprofessional soccer player Carter David Payne, 20, in Statesboro, investigators have been unable to identify the vehicle that struck him, or its driver.
Payne, from Phoenix, Arizona, had been a defender with the University of Michigan Wolverines, playing in 10 games and starting in eight as a freshman in 2019 and being named to the Academic All-Big Ten as a sophomore in 2020. As part of his quest to become a professional soccer player, he came to Statesboro last spring to play for Tormenta FC 2, the men’s preprofessional team affiliated with South Georgia Tormenta FC. This allowed him to practice with Tormenta pros while retaining college eligibility, and he planned to return to the University of Michigan after the Tormenta FC wrapped up its summer season, as it did days after the tragedy.
Having been out with friends to a bar and a restaurant, Payne was riding a Lime electric scooter when an unidentified motor vehicle struck him in the southbound righthand lane of Fair Road in front of the Food World supermarket shortly before 1:30 a.m. Saturday, July 9, according to Statesboro Police and Georgia State Patrol reports.
Attempted lifesaving measures were begun at the scene and continued in an ambulance, at East Georgia Regional Medical Center in Statesboro and then at Memorial Health University Medical Center in Savannah. But Payne died later that afternoon at the Savannah hospital.
The week after the accident, the Georgia State Patrol and Statesboro police reported they had little to go on, with no known eyewitnesses to the collision and no known video. That remains the case, although investigators have pursued a couple of leads that so far have not led to a suspect.
“Well, we had some few leads that we kind of went on and came to a dead end, so as of right now there’s nothing, unless somebody comes forward with some information,” Trooper First Class 3 Gerald Lyles of the Georgia State Patrol said in a phone interview two weeks ago.
Lyles, stationed in Dublin with GSP Troop F’s Specialized Collision Reconstruction Team, is in charge of the SCRT portion of the investigation. He said that the team’s work on the investigation was completed, “unless anything else comes up.”
Reports requested
The Statesboro Herald filed an open records request Oct. 3 with the Georgia Department of Public Safety for the SCRT report as well as the crash and incident reports. The department’s Open Records Unit emailed the crash and incident reports the next day.
But in the same email, Nkenge Green, attorney manager of the Open Records Unit, stated that “the SCRT file is not releasable.”
“It’s a hit and run so the investigation is still ongoing,” Green replied when asked why.
The reporter then called Lyles again to ask about the nature of the dead-end leads he had mentioned.
“The only thing I can really say on that is we did have a video that we did find a vehicle in,” Lyles said. “That’s about it. I can’t go much further, but we did have a vehicle but no tag or anything like that. That’s all.”
He added that the entire SCRT file could not be released yet because “anything still could come up with the investigation.”
Friends on scooters
The incident report, which contains a more detailed narrative than the basic vehicle crash report, was filed by Trooper First Class 3 Jamey Holloway of GSP Post 45, Statesboro. In the narrative dated the day after the accident, Holloway stated that another trooper at the scene spoke to one of Payne’s friends – this friend, named in the report, was a Tormenta FC 2 teammate – who said the two of them had driven Lime scooters to the Cook Out restaurant after leaving the Blue Room bar.
While at Cook Out, they met “another friend” – also named in the report, and not a Tormenta player – and Payne’s teammate offered him a ride. Payne then left “and began traveling south,” on one of the stand-up electric scooters, according to the narrative. The other two men, ages 23 and 24, apparently riding together on the other scooter, reportedly left about 45 seconds later.
After traveling about a tenth of a mile and passing Burger King, they “noticed someone lying in the roadway, with a Lime scooter lying beside him.” The teammate at first thought that Payne might have just fallen over, but found that he wasn’t responding and that his injuries were serious. The two other men pulled Payne onto the shoulder of the road, and someone called 911.
With no eyewitnesses to the crash itself, investigators were uncertain at the time of the report whether Payne was simply crossing the highway or traveling down it.
“It is unknown if Mr. Payne drove on the sidewalk or in the roadway before being struck,” Holloway wrote in the narrative.
The night of the tragedy, another trooper went to EGRMC in an attempt to gather information from Payne “and possibly get a blood draw but could not due to ER staff rendering aid,” the report states. Any medical information investigators obtained later could be part of the unreleased file, Lyles acknowledged.
SPD role
Holloway checked later that day for any businesses with video cameras but did not find any that captured the crash, he noted in the incident narrative. In a July 20 update, he stated that Capt. Kaleb Moore of the Statesboro Police Department had assisted by checking vehicles on the department’s Flock camera system with Carfax, but also “was not successful in locating anything that may help track down the vehicle that fled the scene.”
A single “Flock” brand camera is currently the SPD’s only license plate-reading camera. It is not on Fair Road but in the area of Chandler Road and Lanier Drive, said Chief of Police Mike Broadhead.
“We checked everywhere that we could for any kind of video that would help,” he said last week. “We have a license-plate reader at a fixed location a few blocks from there. We checked every vehicle that went by there in any kind of timely manner and did not develop any further leads that would help us get to the conclusion.”
For two years now, the SPD has been developing its Fusus network, signing up businesses and apartment complexes that have private camera systems for a service that records video and can be monitored from police headquarters. Broadhead also favors adding more fixed-location license plate readers, which he says would not be used for issuing speeding tickets but for investigating more serious crimes after-the-fact.
One possible lead he mentioned in the Payne hit-and-run was a citizen’s tip.
“As best I understand it, somebody called and said they knew of a vehicle with fresh damage that they thought was suspicious, and we just turned that over to the State Patrol,” Broadhead said.
Anyone with information about the case is asked to contact Holloway with the Georgia State Patrol at (912) 688-6999 or the Statesboro Police Department at (912) 764-9911. Anonymous tips may be sent to tips@statesboroga.gov.
“Again, I think somebody out there knows that they did it and they’re feeling guilty, and they’ve told someone, and we just need those people to come forward and give us some information,” Broadhead said Friday.
Meanwhile, Lyles had mentioned being contacted by a private investigator he thought had been hired by Payne’s family. But after Payne’s father said he had no knowledge of this, the Statesboro Herald contacted the private investigator, Miguel Caraballo of Bradenton, Florida.
Phoned Tuesday, Caraballo said he was not hired by the family but by someone else, whom he could not identify because of client confidentiality. He also said he closed his case and had not been asked to do more.
“So I’m not doing anything further on it and it still remains, you know, unsolved,” Caraballo said.
Father’s view
Carter Payne’s father, Christopher Payne, a Phoenix-area attorney with 30 years experience in legal practice, said he can speak only for himself but doesn’t know whether someone being charged in the hit-and-run would make a difference to him in terms of closure.
“Part of me isn’t sure that I really want to know any more of the details,” Payne said.
He said he didn’t even have a copy of the incident report.
“On the one hand, there are days when I’m sad that I don’t know who killed my son,” Payne said. “But on the other hand, because I don’t know any of the details, I don’t know that somebody actually killed him, or where to allocate the fault or the blame.”
Finding out those details “might tear open more wounds,” he said.
“I personally don’t need to have anybody punished. It’s a tragedy as it was,” Payne said. “If they found somebody and charges were brought, so be it, but I don’t have a need for vengeance or that kind of retribution.”
