A woman in her 20s has died after being struck by a vehicle in Mississauga, in a collision that police are continuing to investigate. The death has prompted an appeal to the public for information, as officers work to piece together exactly how the young woman came to be run over on a busy road in the city west of Toronto late at night.
Emergency crews were called to the scene at around 11:20 p.m. on Saturday, responding to reports of a person struck on the roadway. According to police, the woman was crossing Queensway Drive in a northbound direction, doing so mid-block rather than at an intersection, when the sequence of events that led to her death began to unfold in the darkness.
Police say the woman first reached the centre median of the road, which would normally offer a place of relative safety between the lanes of traffic. From there, however, she stepped off the median and into the westbound lanes, where she fell onto the road, leaving her exposed and in the path of oncoming traffic at a dangerous moment.
It was at that point, police say, that she was run over by the involved vehicle, which was described as a sedan. The circumstances left the woman with fatal injuries at the scene, turning what had begun as an attempt to cross the road into a deadly collision on one of Mississauga's main thoroughfares.
In an unusual detail, the vehicle involved initially left the scene after the collision. According to police, however, it returned about eight minutes later, bringing the driver back to the spot where the woman had been struck. That brief departure and return has become one of the elements officers are examining as they reconstruct what happened.
The driver was arrested and charged with failure to remain resulting in death, a charge tied to the initial departure from the scene. Police said, however, that the driver has since been released unconditionally, meaning no conditions were imposed at this stage, even as the investigation into the collision remains active and open.
Investigators say they are continuing to look into the circumstances surrounding the crash, including whether there was any criminal intent behind what took place. Police have asked anyone with information, or with dash cam footage that may have captured the collision or the moments around it, to come forward and contact them as the inquiry proceeds.