Man who killed Wichita woman in 2024 speeding crash sentenced
A Colorado man who struck and killed an 82-year-old Wichita woman after driving more than double the posted speed limit in 2024 has been sentenced to prison.
26-year-old Austin Hedges told police that he was driving the speed limit on March 16, 2024, while on his way to dinner with a friend. But when 82-year-old Kathy Knorr pulled out in front of him at an intersection near the 800 block of North Rock Road, Hedges said he didn’t have time to react and struck the woman’s vehicle.
Knorr was taken to a hospital with several broken bones, collapsed lungs and a brain bleed. She died two weeks later.
But witnesses to the crash, court documents described, said the 26-year-old Colorado man was driving considerably faster than the street’s 40 mph speed limit.
“She would have made it if he wasn’t going so fast,” one witness told police, according to an affidavit in the case.
Data pulled from Hedges’ 2024 Volkswagen showed he was driving 93 miles per hour five seconds before the car’s airbags deployed. When he struck Knorr’s Lexus, he was driving 56 miles per hour.
A driver going north on Rock Road before the crash told police Hedges “’came out of nowhere’ and that the collision would not have occurred if . . . (Hedges) was not speeding,” court documents read.
In November 2025, Hedges accepted a deal and pleaded guilty to one count of involuntary manslaughter. Last week, he was sentenced to 31 months, or two and a half years, in prison with two years of post-release supervision.
