Prosecutors Tuesday filed formal charges against the man they say was impaired when he hit a 17-year-old girl Sunday in South Bend. She remained in critical condition Tuesday.
The Goshen teen had been walking with her sister along Mishawaka Avenue as their mother parked the car. That’s when police say 38-year-old Gregory Michael Durling drove off the street and hit her with his pickup truck, knocking her into the Canney’s Water Solutions building and emergency responders pulled her out of the rubble.
Court records say Memorial Hospital doctors initially gave her a 50/50 chance of surviving and said they could need to amputate her legs. Prosecutors say they hadn’t needed to amputate yet as of Tuesday, but both femurs are crushed and she has a brain bleed, as well as bleeding from the spleen and liver.
Police said Durling was visibly impaired and they found needles and a baggie containing a white powder in the truck. Charging documents say Durling indicated that he had injected a cocaine mixture into himself about an hour before the crash and added that he has struggled with addiction for years.
On Tuesday Durling was charged with two Level 5 felonies. In recent years Durling has been a chemistry and biochemistry graduate student at Notre Dame. It was unclear whether he was still enrolled.
