A 57-year-old Lanai woman who was struck by
a pickup truck Thursday was the first pedestrian killed in at least 10 years on the Pineapple Island, and only the second person killed in a traffic crash there since 2010.
The island has no traffic light and only 30 miles of paved roadways.
“I did five years on Lanai, so when I saw that notification, I thought, ‘How is that possible?’,” Maui Police Department acting spokesman Sgt. John Sang said.
A 2018 Ford pickup truck, driven by a 55-year-old Lanai man, struck and killed the woman at about 12:10 p.m. Thursday while she was crossing the street in tiny
Lanai City, police said.
Police identified the woman as Christine Sandi.
A preliminary investigation revealed Sandi was legally within the roadway, crossing Lanai Avenue from west to east, when the pickup truck, headed north on Lanai Avenue, hit her
10 feet north of Sixth Street, police said.
She was taken with critical life-threatening injuries to Lanai Community Hospital, where she died.
The driver was uninjured.
Police are still investigating the collision and have not yet determined whether speed, drugs or alcohol were involved.
This was Maui County’s 20th traffic fatality of 2019, compared with 16 the same time last year.
The last person to die in
a car crash on Lanai was 34-year-old Natasha Jenkins on Sept. 4, 2016. The Lanai woman was the lone occupant of a Toyota Corolla sedan when she veered off the roadway at 3:18 a.m., hit an embankment and was ejected from the vehicle. The car rolled over several times and landed on top of her. She was driving on Keomoku Road at the 6.8 mile marker. Her friends were following her, but did not witness the accident, and found her under the vehicle, police said.
Sgt. Sang recalled a fatal single-vehicle crash in 2005, while he was stationed on Lanai, which predates MPD’s current database system.
Sang looked at data on “major” vehicle crashes on Lanai over the past year and none involved injuries to
humans.
He did find four crashes
in which Axis deer were killed. In one case, a man struck a deer with his vehicle. In another a deer hit a police car. And two other deer crashes involved county vehicles.