Walorski crash mystery deepens: Father of driver says his son never would have put Congresswoman's life at risk
Sheriff's office said crash was caused by Zach Potts crossing the double yellow line to pass a truck, but father says this makes 'no sense'
Richard Potts, the father of Zachery Potts, who was driving the vehicle in the terrible Aug. 3 crash in northern Indiana that killed U.S. Rep. Jackie Walorski, said he is “unsettled” by the crash and the sheriff’s office finding that Zach crossed into oncoming traffic to pass a truck, causing the head-on collision.
“Here’s what I can tell you about Zach with Jackie,” Potts told Crossroads Report this week: “Zach thought so much of Jackie that she filmed a commercial at our house. If you were to get in Zach’s car in the passenger seat you would think Jackie owned the car because Zach would provide and supply everything that made her happy – to the extent that he bought air freshener for his car that Jackie liked. Not that Zach liked it, but Jackie liked it. So, nowhere in my mind do I feel that my son would ever put her at risk.”
“Never, ever has Zach ever, one time, said anything bad about Jackie Walorski,” he added.
Zach Potts was the 27-year-old district director for U.S. Rep. Jackie Walorski (R-IN), and was also the chairman of the St. Joseph County Republican Party, based in South Bend.
On Aug. 3, he was driving Walorski back to Elkhart, where she lived, after a meeting in a small town more than an hour to the south.
They were heading north on State Road 19, a two-lane road.
Walorski was in the passenger seat and Emma Thomson, age 28, Walorski’s communications director, was in the back seat on the passenger side.
They were in Zach’s 2019 Toyota Rav4, a small SUV.
“We have questioned time and time again about that car,” said Potts. “He bought that car because of all the safety features.”
The Elkhart County Sheriff’s Department said in concluding its investigation in September that all evidence pointed to Zach crossing over the double yellow line into the southbound lane in order to pass a flatbed truck, described by a witness as the kind that lumber companies use.
“It just didn’t make sense that he would willingly be in an oncoming lane on a curve with the lady sitting next to him that, I’ll say was probably the second or third most important person in his life,” said Potts.
Walorski had just had a meeting in Claypool at the offices of Louis Dreyfus, a European-based agri-business company. They’d left Louis Dreyfus at 11:44 a.m.
There was nothing on the schedule for the rest of the day, and Walorski’s husband, Dean Swihart, told a sheriff’s deputy later that Walorski had sent him a text message just before noon saying when she got home she wanted to get in the pool and that in the evening, they had plans to go out to dinner.
Potts said he never knew his son to drive recklessly as an adult.
“Overall he was a good driver,” he said. “Now, when he was a teenager, you know, teenagers do stupid teenager things. But once he got into politics in college, that changed.”
Zach Potts went to Indiana University-South Bend and became heavily involved there with Republican politics. He graduated in 2017 with a bachelor’s degree in political science and sociology and just two years later, in 2019, was elected chairman of the St. Joseph County Republican Party.
A friend who knew him in St. Joseph County Republican politics called him a “rising star” in the state, and says he was being groomed to take over the state Republican Party, replacing the current chairman, Kyle Hupfer, who is running for vice-chairman of the RNC.
“To the conservative movement, Zach was such a bigger loss than Jackie,” he said. “He was just a savant.”
It was Zach, he said, through his hard work in political organizing, who had started turning St. Joseph County (home to South Bend) into a Republican county, saying: “He totally changed the political landscape here.”
The changes were so profound that in November, the county elected its first Republican clerk in decades, if not ever, and its first Republican county assessor.
Zach was also engaged to be married to his longtime girlfriend, Ashlea Davis.
On Aug. 3, one of the first calls to 911 after the accident was from Zach’s phone, which was connected to his Apple Watch, which had a ‘crash detection’ feature and so automatically had the phone call 911 and Zach’s emergency contacts, including his father.
The recording announces the coordinates, latitude and longitude, and requests assistance.
Zach’s father, on getting the call, called the police department and was able to confirm that there had been a crash.
He says that about two weeks after the crash, in an attempt to try to understand what happened, he drove the same route Zach had that day, going north on State Road 19, toward the roundabout at the junction with State Road 119, where Zach’s Toyota had collided head-on with the maroon Buick LeSabre driven by nursing home worker Edith Schmucker, age 56.
“I don’t see Zach making a decision to do that unless it was absolutely necessary,” he says, “So, let’s say if the car was speeding up by itself and he had to try to swerve to miss the truck? I could see that taking place. But Zach going into a roundabout to pass a truck when there’s no lane there?”
His car had lane assist, his father says.
“The car that he had, the lane assist would not let you go much across the line, unless his blinker was on,” he told Crossroads Report.
“Something doesn’t set well about the accident, I’m just going to be honest with you,” he said.
Zach should have known there was a roundabout coming up, he says, given that he had just come through it going south about an hour earlier.
Strange movements of Toyota before the crash…
In the full, 63-page report of the investigation, the driver of a pick-up truck that was behind Zach’s Toyota going north on State Road 19 said the Toyota slowed down to about 40 miles per hour, but without braking, as if Zach just took his foot off the gas pedal for no apparent reason.
Then, all of a sudden, the Toyota took off at what the witness described as “full acceleration,” quickly closing the gap between the Toyota and the large, flatbed truck that was up ahead.
He then described the Toyota making “jerky” movements in its lane, as though the driver was struggling to control the vehicle.
The Toyota then came up so fast on the flatbed truck that it almost rear-ended it, and then made a “hard swerve to the left” to the left, into the southbound lane, in what he said appeared to be an attempt to avoid hitting the truck.
The witness, Keith Philips, specifically told a detective that he did not think it was a deliberate attempt to pass, and said it appeared to him that something was wrong with either the driver or the vehicle of the Toyota.
An examination of the “black box” — the airbag control module — from the Toyota Rav4 showed the vehicle was goin 82 miles an hour 4.7 seconds before the crash, and had slowed to 77.7 miles per hour right before the crash.
The speed limit on State Road 19 is 55 miles per hour, but reduces to 45 miles per hour just before the roundabout.
The module also showed that Zach didn’t brake, and didn’t have his foot on the accelerator either.
Why would Zach have been coasting in the wrong lane just before the roundabout, with the boss he so much admired in the seat next to him?
Zach’s friend said he and others who knew Zach just assumed that Zach had been texting, and that this was the cause of the crash.
He says he knows that Zach was texting people that day, before the crash, but didn’t know exactly what time, and didn’t know whether it would have been while Zach was driving.
But the report from the Elkhart County Sheriff’s Department says that all cell phones found in the vehicle were inspected, and that there is “no evidence of cell phone use around the time of the collision.”
Others have raised the issue of the Covid-19 vaccines, and wondered if Zach had a medical event caused by the vaccine that would have incapacitated him.
When asked if Zach had gotten the vaccine, his father said, “No.”
When asked how he could be certain, he said:
“I’m pretty sure he would have told us. He’s a lot like I am. I’m very anti-vaccination. Unless he was forced to get it, he would not have gotten it.”
He also said Zach had no health conditions.
Zach Potts survived the accident and was taken to Elkhart General Hospital, but died shortly after arrival.
Jackie Walorski and Emma Thomson also survived the collision. Keith Philips, the driver who had been behind Zach, was the first to open the doors of the Rav4 and reported to the 911 operator that both had a faint pulse, but neither was conscious. Zach, the driver, was moaning, he’d said.
Paramedics administered emergency medical treatment to Thomson, but neither she nor Walorski could be saved. Both were pronounced dead on the scene.
Edith Schmucker, the driver of the maroon Buick LeSabre that was hit head-on, had died on impact.
All four had been wearing seatbelts and airbags had deployed in both vehicles.
Photos of the Toyota Rav4 taken as it was to be sold for parts (see below) show that both front and side airbags in the vehicle deployed after the crash.
Unfortunately, the impact was too great for anyone to survive.
Potts, Thomson and Schmucker were all found to have died of multiple injuries caused by the collision, while Walorski was found to have died of “dislocation of the cervical spine.”
Some interesting info on the RAV4 blogs regarding problems (serious) with Lane Tracing Assist (LTA) and other electronic guidance features. Here’s an amusing one.
Q (Varimin): “Is it possible that the system uses your past trips as guidance, meaning does it use the predictive feature and learn from past routes?”
A: (RobertB): “I think it does. My wife's Rav tries to tear the steering wheel out of my hands when I pass Walmart. Come to think of it the LTA is turned off. Weird!”
Thanks, Margaret, for continuing to investigate this.