Someone was driving an SUV and was allegedly drunk when he hit two cyclists and ran over one of them on a road near Dallas Fort Worth International Airport on Mo. A witness provided video of the suspect, who was later identified by Dallas Fort Worth Airport police as Benjamin Peter Hylander, 31, traveling quickly in the right-hand lane before hitting the two unaware cyclists.
Hylander quickly stops after the first impact, then runs over the lower half of one of the cyclists, and then drives off in a white SUV, as seen in the video.
Tom Geppert, 69, one of the bikers who was hit, told FOX 4 that he didn’t even know what had happened at first.
“All of a sudden, something pushes me from behind,” Geppert remembered. “Then I could feel myself falling from the right, and then that’s pretty much the last thing I remember.”
Geppert, a retired doctor, was riding with a group of bikers when he was hit by Hylander’s SUV. He said that the vehicle ran over his thigh. For FOX 4, he said that his bike saved his life because things could have been a lot worse.
Wednesday night, was arrested, airport cops told Fox News Digital.
Just before 7 p.m., airport cops got a call about an injured hit-and-run driver.
Police were told that two people were hit by a car while biking near the busy airport and that the whole horrible event was caught on video by a bystander.
Authorities say that two witnesses made sure one of the victims stayed awake until EMS came. He was bleeding from his right knee and couldn’t speak.
“Just so lucky it happened to be my thigh, and I think the bike kind of elevated the car a little bit,” said Geppert. “Just overall amazingly lucky that I’m still alive.”
Witnesses told police that they followed Hylander to the closest gas station, where they got his license plate and told him to come back to the accident scene.
Records show that when Hylander got back to the scene of the accident, he ran up to the hurt rider and yelled, “I’m sorry!” while trying to talk to him.
Police say Hylander kept apologizing to the hurt rider. When he started talking to them, they said they could smell alcohol on his breath and saw that his eyes were bloodshot and glassy.
When asked if he had been drinking, Hylander reportedly told police that he had only one beer an hour before getting behind the wheel. He later said he couldn’t remember how many he had, but that he had “maybe two or three large beers.”
Police say that when they searched Hylander’s car, they found six empty beer cans in a backpack behind the passenger seat. A few feet away from Hylander’s car at the gas station, two empty beer cans were found in the grass.
All of the empty beer cans were turned in by police as evidence. At this point, it is not known if the two empty cans found in the grass had anything to do with Hylander because the gas station was unable to provide camera video.
Hylander, who cops said worked as a cargo worker for American Airlines, was arrested for DWI and is now being charged with two counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.
KDFW says that both cyclists have been freed from the hospital.
