When 18-year-old Hailey King was fatally struck by a truck driven by an immigrant living in the U.S. illegally — a vehicle authorities said was traveling 36 mph over the speed limit — her mother, Kathy Hall, made a promise at her daughter’s bedside: she would keep pushing for justice.
Speaking in an interview provided exclusively to Fox News Digital by the advocacy organization The American Border Story, Hall described the devastating crash that killed her daughter and said the tragedy propelled her into a fight aimed at preventing other families from enduring the same loss.
King had been riding a scooter with a friend in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and was headed home for dinner when she was struck from behind by a speeding truck driven by Sergio Rodriguez, whom Hall identified as an undocumented immigrant. Hall said the impact threw her daughter onto the truck’s hood before Rodriguez kept driving, veered into another lane and caused King to be thrown headfirst onto the roadway. King suffered catastrophic injuries, including a brain stem hemorrhage, internal and external bleeding around the skull, a ruptured spleen and a torn liver. She died soon after the Nov. 7, 2016, crash, leaving behind her 2-year-old daughter, Brooklyn.
According to Hall, Rodriguez received a 17-year prison sentence after being convicted on charges including manslaughter, battery and leaving the scene of a crime. But about 18 months later, she said, she learned he had become eligible for parole — a development that has required her to return to court again and again to argue against his release and revisit the trauma of her daughter’s death.
Hall recalled that authorities came to her home on the night of the crash and told her simply, “You need to come with us to the hospital.”
When she arrived, she said, she was taken into Hailey’s hospital room and found her daughter “sitting up at a kind of an angle,” with her eyes open but fixed, as if she were “staring off into space.”
“I knew right when I looked at her that she was gone,” Hall said. She said she sat beside Hailey, told her how deeply she loved her and promised she would “never” stop seeking justice. Moments later, she said, her daughter’s heart stopped.
Hall also said King’s friend, Osmin “David” Gutierrez, suffered horrific injuries after becoming trapped beneath the truck as Rodriguez allegedly continued driving for more than a mile. She said Rodriguez eventually pulled into an apartment complex after sparks appeared, and Gutierrez was left in the driveway gravely injured and “screaming for his life.”
“He was still conscious,” she said.
Gutierrez died two years later from a blood clot resulting from his lost legs.
Despite her promise, Hall said getting justice for her daughter has been a “hard long road.” After the incident, Hall said Rodriguez “disappeared for three days” before police found him. When he was apprehended, Hall said Rodriguez was released on bond in less than an hour.
She believes that Rodriguez was “protected every step of the way” during the trial process while she and her family “were treated like we were the criminals when we’d go into court.”
Despite his immigration status, Hall said a decision was made not to notify US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. She said she was told that “if we would have informed ICE that he was here and he was illegal, that they would have just picked him up and taken him down to Texas and sent him back and he would have never had to deal with the death of [her] daughter.”
At the time, Hall said the family felt this “was kind of putting us in a rock and a hard place.”
“It’s so confusing to be there and say, ‘OK, do I want him to be deported right now or do I just want him to spend time either way and get him out?’” she said. “We had no idea, you know, a choice like that. What kind of decision do you make?”
Due to parole hearings, Hall said that she and her family “have to relive this right now every two years.”
“As soon as the pain dulls a little bit, you have to go back through the whole thing preparing to try to keep him behind bars again,” she said. “My daughter, the only thing she did wrong that day was being on the back of a scooter coming home for dinner. She didn’t deserve this.”
“She doesn’t deserve for her daughter to not know who she is and how much she loved her. She doesn’t deserve any of it, and she deserves to have the justice I promised to her as she was dying,” Hall continued, concluding, “I’ll never stop fighting; I’m going to do everything I can to keep my promise to her.”
Fox News Digital reached out to the Fayetteville Police Department, Washington County Sheriff’s Office, Washington County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office and Washington County Circuit Court for comment.
