A 60-year-old Park City man has died nearly two weeks after a wheel broke loose from a trailer and struck him while he rode an electric scooter along the shoulder of Route 41 in Gurnee. Domingo Ocampo was riding north on the highway shoulder near the Grand Avenue exit on July 27 when the trailer, being towed by a northbound pickup truck, lost two wheels that struck him.
Ocampo was rushed to Advocate Condell Medical Center, where he was treated in the intensive care unit before he died on August 8, according to CBS News Chicago. The Lake County Coroner's Office determined that Ocampo died from complications of blunt force head injuries caused by the accident, the outlet reported. Advocate Condell operates as Lake County's only designated Level I trauma center, a designation that explains why Ocampo was routed there for the most intensive level of trauma care available in the region.
Front Loader Trailer Lost Its Wheels Mid-Drive
The truck pulling the trailer has since been identified as a Ford F-450 driven by a 45-year-old Waukegan resident, who was hauling a front loader north on Route 41 when the trailer's two wheels detached, according to the Gurnee Police Department. The driver was uninjured, stayed at the scene, and fully cooperated with investigators, police said. Officers have publicly asked for anyone with dashcam footage recorded near Route 41 and Grand Avenue around 5:25 p.m. on July 27 to come forward as they work to reconstruct exactly how the wheels came loose.
Bystanders happened to flag down Gurnee Fire Battalion Chief Nick Perry, who was returning to Fire Station #1 from an unrelated call at the time, according to the Lake and McHenry County Scanner. That chance encounter let emergency crews begin treating Ocampo immediately rather than waiting for a dispatched unit to arrive.
Multi-Agency Team Now Investigating the Crash
Gurnee Police and the Lake County Major Crash Assistance Team are investigating the crash, per the CBS News Chicago report. The Major Crash Assistance Team, known as MCAT, is a multi-jurisdictional mutual aid task force made up of specially trained collision investigators drawn from regional police departments who are called in to document complex or fatal crash scenes, according to the Village of Lincolnshire. The same task force investigated a separate pedestrian run down twice near Grand Avenue in Gurnee earlier this year, a case that also sent a victim to Advocate Condell.
Illinois law places specific restrictions on both halves of this crash. Under state vehicle code 625 ILCS 5/11-1518, low-speed electric scooters are barred from operating on state highways or any roadway with a posted speed limit above 35 mph, a rule that touches on where Ocampo was riding when he was struck. Separately, 625 ILCS 5/15-110 requires that any vehicle towing another on controlled-access highways or outside business and residential areas use a drawbar and be coupled with two safety chains or cables strong enough to prevent separation, according to FindLaw. It remains unclear whether investigators believe either statute factored into how the trailer's wheels came loose.
A Statewide Pattern of Scooter Injuries
Ocampo's death lands amid growing data on the dangers facing e-scooter riders more broadly. A 2025 study by University of Illinois Chicago researchers, which analyzed 34,073 Illinois hospital visits from 2021 to 2023, found that e-scooter users were twice as likely to be admitted to an intensive care unit compared to traditional cyclists, according to research published on PubMed. Nationally, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission recorded 206 e-scooter fatalities between 2017 and 2024, identifying motor vehicle collisions and control issues as the leading hazards.
State officials have already begun responding to the broader safety concerns. In January, the Illinois Secretary of State's Office launched the “Ride Safe, Ride Smart, Ride Ready” initiative to update the state vehicle code and evaluate age, insurance, and licensing requirements for electric micromobility devices, according to Spiros Law. Whether that effort will touch on incidents like Ocampo's, involving a scooter rider struck by highway equipment rather than a scooter malfunction, is not addressed in the initiative's stated scope.
Gurnee Police have not announced any citations or charges in connection with the crash, and the investigation into how the trailer's wheels detached remains open. Anyone with dashcam footage from near Route 41 and Grand Avenue around the time of the July 27 crash is asked to contact investigators.
