A Marine veteran was struck and killed by a truck while he changed his tire on the shoulder of Chicago freeway on Sunday night.
Nikolas Hutto, 28, was on his way to grab deep dish pizza after a Blackhawks game with friends when his car hit a pothole and got a flat tire.
He pulled to the right shoulder on I-55 near Cicero Avenue and Garfield Ridge and got out of the car with his friends to change the tire around 6.40pm.
As they did that, a pickup truck, driving on the shoulder, came charging at them and hit the three of them.
Nikolas died on impact and his two friends were taken to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries. The driver of the truck was also taken to the hospital.
‘I was worried that I would have to feel this way years ago, but now, now it’s happened,’ Jeffery Hutto, Nikolas’s dad told ABC 7 Chicago.
The pick-up driver has not yet been identified and it is unclear why he drove on the shoulder that night.
The Illinois State Police told DailyMail.com that the crash is still being investigated and ‘only preliminary information’ is available for now.
Nikolas’s friends, who were visiting him from Florida, were released from the hospital on Monday.
Nikolas’s relatives said that he had just moved to the south suburbs of Chicago a few months ago after retiring from the service in 2020.
He joined the Marines in 2015 after high school and served in the Middle East. He was honorably discharged as a sergeant in 2020.
‘He was satisfied walking away from it. He felt like he accomplished what he set out to do during his time there,’ his mother, Tammy Hutto told the Chicago Sun Times.
Once he left the Marines, he got a job in the information technology field and set out to earn his master’s degree at Penn State University.
He moved from Tampa, Florida to Tinley Park in November after he and his girlfriend, Monica Czajkowski bought a home together in September.