Driver fatally beaten by bar patrons for striking, killing woman

An Alabama driver has succumbed to his injuries after he was brutally beaten by bar patrons over the weekend for fatally running over a woman outside the pub, police said.

Kenneth E. Harrison, 45, died at a trauma center on Wednesday, four days after he was beaten down outside The Tavern on Highway 31 in Atmore, Sgt. Darrell McMann told AL.com.

Harrison, who had a previous manslaughter conviction, was driving a 2005 Chevrolet Tahoe on Saturday when he struck Hannah Martin, 24, as she walked across the highway to the bar.

The force of the impact knocked Martin into The Tavern’s parking lot, while Harrison pulled in behind her.

Martin was transported to the hospital but later died from her injuries.

The sight of the grisly accident then allegedly sparked an unknown number of bar patrons to set upon Harrison, who was beaten so badly that he was airlifted to a trauma center at University Hospital, AL.com said.

“His hands were completely bruised where he had fought back, he had road rash on his shoulders and knees, his chest,” Harrison’s girlfriend, Kati Riley, told WKRG on Monday.

Riley said she was moving the couple’s SUV out of the way when the attack started – and that she wishes she had been by her partner’s side.

“If I could’ve stopped these people at least I could’ve took half the beatings so he wouldn’t have been in the condition he was in,” she lamented.

The grieving girlfriend also insisted the collision that killed Martin was an accident.

“We seen three heads just by the light that the bar did have and we went to swerve around them there she was. We didn’t even see her until we hit her. Here I am having to deal with the guilt that the vehicle I was in killed this child,” Riley said of the moment Harrison hit the young woman.

Harrison was getting out of the car to help Martin when the bar patrons attacked, she claimed.

“Instead of driving off or just pulling over and locking the doors we cared about her and he got the ultimate punishment for it,” she insisted.

Riley is hoping those who beat Harrison will be charged in connection with his death.

Investigators are “nearing a resolution” on the probe into Harrison’s beating, McMann told AL.com.

The final decision on whether to press charges, he said, would come from the Mobile County District Attorney’s Office.

As of Tuesday afternoon, the bar-goers involved in the alleged attack have not been publicly identified.

Meanwhile, the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency (ALEA) is looking into the crash that killed Martin.

It is not yet clear whether the driver or the victim was impaired by alcohol at the time of the tragedy, AL.com noted.

Just over a decade before his death, in 2011, Harrison pleaded guilty to manslaughter charges in Baldwin County related to the beating death of a man who vanished 6 years earlier, the outlet said, citing court records.

He was sentenced to 15 years in state prison, in addition to a 10-year concurrent term for a previous theft conviction.

Harrison was released, however, in February 2016 after serving the minimum of five years, according to AL.com.