Motor Vehicle Accident

DATE & TIME: 08-08-2018 @ 2:51 pm

LOCATION: Highway 77 / Highway 41 (East Junction) South of Cortland

OFFENSE: Motor Vehicle Accident

CASE #: 2018-4057

The Gage County Sheriff’s Office was dispatched to an injury accident on Highway 77, about 2 ½ miles south of Cortland at the Highway 41 (East) junction. Investigators and deputies responded to the accident, which was initially reported to be a rollover accident.

Just prior to the accident, a citizen had called Southeast Communications to report a driver not staying in her lane. The vehicle was described as a silver Toyota with no license plates. A couple minutes after the original dispatch of a driving complaint, Southeast Communications was advised the vehicle had passed through Cortland and had struck a light pole near the junction of Highway 77 and Highway 41, about 2 ½ miles south of Cortland.

When deputies arrived, 23-year-old Tori Schultz from Fairbury, Nebraska was on the phone and crying.  The witness who had called in the driving complaint pointed her out to the deputies as the driver of the car. Fire/Rescue/ambulance units from the Cortland Fire Department and Clatonia Fire Department were dispatched to the scene and transported Schultz to Byran West Hospital in Lincoln, Nebraska.

Investigation at the scene determined Tori Schultz had been drifting from lane to lane on Highway 77 from about Saltillo Road in Lincoln. After passing through Cortland, Schultz’s vehicle drifted off the highway to the right, missing a stalled vehicle on the shoulder by inches, and struck a light pole head on, then drove into the ditch, before the vehicle came to a stop a couple hundred feet after the accident.

An investigator assigned to the case will follow-up on the accident. Alcohol is not suspected and the driver was not wearing her seatbelt. The airbags in both the driver and passenger sides deployed.  Schultz had borrowed the vehicle from a friend who had purchased it two days earlier from a dealership in Lincoln.

Sheriff Millard “Gus” Gustafson #903

Investigator T. Hanson #90310