Mother, toddler hit by driver under influence of marijuana, police say

Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• A Grantsville driver was arrested and accused of hitting a woman and her 1-year-old son in a stroller.
• Police suspect the 26-year-old man was under the influence of marijuana.
• The young child was taken to Primary Children's Hospital.

GRANTSVILLE — A Grantsville driver was arrested Tuesday and accused of hitting a woman and her 1-year-old son who was in a stroller.

Police were called Tuesday afternoon to the corner of Meadow Lark Circle and West Clark Street in Grantsville on a report of an auto-pedestrian crash. A woman was pushing a stroller across the road with her 1-year-old son inside and her 2-year-old son following on a balance bike — made for toddlers without pedals.

According to video recorded from a nearby house and later obtained by officers, the mother was on the corner and checked traffic before her 2-year-old son began to cross followed by the mother pushing the stroller, a police booking affidavit states.

"The son had made it to the other corner and the mother had walked approximately 35 feet across the road when (the driver) … could be seen rapidly turning from West Clark Street onto Meadow Lark Circle heading south, turning at a high rate of speed into the opposite lane of travel. The woman screamed and waved her arms to try and stop (the driver), but the brake lights did not activate," the affidavit states.

The car hit the stroller with its front bumper and then knocked the mother to the ground, according to police.

"His vehicle missed the child on the balance bike by mere inches. No avoidance maneuver could be seen. The stroller flew a measured 43 feet and 4 inches and rolled on a sideways axis one complete rotation through the air, landing ... coming to rest on the west side curb and gutter of the road," according to the affidavit.

The car continued another 51 feet before stopping.

The 1-year-old suffered "a large head contusion and was actively bleeding" before being taken to Primary Children's Hospital, the affidavit says. An update on both the mother and her son was not immediately available on Wednesday.

Police questioned the driver, Nathan Michael Craven, 26, and noted he had "a strong odor of marijuana coming from the car." An officer conducted field sobriety tests on Craven which had mixed results, according to the affidavit.

"I believed Nathan to be under the influence of illicit drugs, specifically cannabis," the officer wrote in the arrest report.

After being arrested, Craven admitted to having a bottle of fake urine hidden in his shorts, which he claimed "he kept it on him in case of a random drug screening at his work," the affidavit alleges.

Craven was booked into the Tooele County Jail and charged Wednesday in 3rd District Court with two counts of negligently operating a vehicle causing serious injury, a third-degree felony; reckless endangerment, a class A misdemeanor; and reckless driving, a class B misdemeanor.

The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.

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Pat Reavy

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Pat Reavy interned with KSL NewsRadio in 1989 and has been a full-time journalist for either KSL NewsRadio, Deseret News or KSL.com since 1991. For the past 25 years, he has worked primarily the cops and courts beat.