The Pinellas-Pasco State Attorney’s Office will not prosecute a St. Petersburg sanitation worker who had been arrested on a charge that he left the scene after hitting and killing a woman who was sleeping in an alley.
State Attorney Bruce Bartlett filed what is known as a “no information” in the case on Friday.
“The State Attorney … concludes that the facts and circumstances revealed do not warrant prosecution at this time,” the court filing reads without providing more detail.
Nathan D. Brown, 51, was arrested May 30 on a charge of leaving the scene of a crash involving death, hours after the sanitation truck he was driving hit and killed Candice Roberts, 49, in an alley off Third Street North. Police say Brown hit Roberts once while backing into the alley and again on the way out.
Brown’s attorney, Lee Pearlman, told the Tampa Bay Times on Wednesday that Brown didn’t know he had hit someone.
“The reality is my client had no idea there was someone essentially sleeping in the road,” Pearlman said. “These are big trucks. He did not know he ran over a human being by any stretch.”
Brown arrived about 6:30 a.m. to the alley between Central and First avenues, behind Jannus Live, in a 2019 Kenworth truck to pick up a dumpster, according to arrest reports. A delivery driver warned Brown that people were sleeping in the alley, and Brown also told police later that he saw people sleeping there, the reports state.
Brown backed the truck east down the alley about 10 yards, hitting Roberts a first time, then continued another 90 yards to the end of the alley and hooked up the dumpster, a report states. As he drove west to exit onto Third Street, he hit Roberts a second time, then left, the reports say.
One of the reports states that Roberts was “lying perpendicular in the alley and was in clear visual line of sight from the end of the alley,” and that Brown had “a clear and unobstructed view of the victim lying on the ground.”
Based on those facts, Brown “had actual knowledge that the crash occurred” and “should have known from the totality of the circumstances that the victim sustained injury or death,” a report states.
“I think that’s an opinion not grounded in fact or merit,” Pearlman told the Times.
After the warning from the delivery driver, Brown saw two people in an area of the narrow alley where people typically sleep, but he didn’t see a third person, Pearlman said.
“There was a point where my client does get out of the truck, but it’s easily like 100 yards away from where the individual who was struck was,” he said. “There’s no way with the angles and the lighting you would have seen it, especially with all the debris out there.”
The charge Brown faced is a first-degree felony punishable by up to 30 years in state prison.
Brown has been with the city since 1997. He was placed on paid administrative leave after the incident.
Pearlman told the Times last week that Brown, a married father who lives in St. Petersburg, would not have left and gone about his usual route if he’d known what happened.
“This is a very good man who is so sincere, and he’s so distraught about this,” Pearlman said.
