A Berkeley County grand jury has indicted Donte Thornhill, 29, of Westerly, Rhode Island, on one count of gross child neglect resulting in death, nearly ten months after his five-year-old daughter died in an Interstate 81 crash he survived. An indictment is an accusation, not a finding of guilt. WV MetroNews and The Panhandle News Network reported the indictment.
What remains unclear about the crash
The crash occurred around 4 a.m. on January 4 in Berkeley County. Authorities said the child was ejected from the pickup and died from her injuries. A state medical examiner found that she died accidentally from blunt-force trauma to the head and neck, according to WPRI, which obtained the criminal complaint.
The child’s restraint status remains a key disputed detail in the complaint. As reported by The Panhandle News Network, Thornhill first said his daughter was not in a car seat but was wearing a seatbelt; he later said she had been sitting up and wearing a seatbelt. The tractor-trailer driver and Thornhill also gave different accounts of how the vehicles collided. A witness told investigators the pickup had been stopped on the shoulder before entering the travel lane and being struck by the truck.
Investigators downloaded data from the pickup’s airbag-control module. The data indicated Thornhill was not wearing a seatbelt and was traveling 32 miles per hour at the time of the collision, but did not identify occupants in the rear of the vehicle, The Panhandle News Network reported. Those findings do not resolve whether or how the child was restrained.
State law and safety context
West Virginia generally requires children younger than 8 riding in a passenger vehicle, van or pickup to be secured in an approved child passenger safety system. A safety belt is sufficient for a child under 8 who is at least 4 feet 9 inches tall, according to the West Virginia Legislature. The law provides context for the case, but does not establish what happened in this crash.
Statewide figures also show the broader scale of occupant-restraint deaths, though they are not specific to children or to this collision. West Virginia recorded 321 unrestrained passenger-vehicle occupant fatalities from 2020 through 2024, a period when the state averaged 266 motor-vehicle fatalities annually, according to the Governor’s Highway Safety Program.
For families seeking a safety-seat check, the West Virginia Division of Motor Vehicles lists a free inspection station at 510 S. Raleigh Street in Martinsburg, Berkeley County. The agency says inspections are conducted by certified child passenger safety technicians.
Arrest and indictment
Thornhill was arrested in July after Rhode Island State Police stopped him on I-95 South in Richmond for driving with a tinted windshield and found an active Berkeley County warrant, WPRI reported. The indictment charges him with gross child neglect resulting in death; the case’s outcome has not been established.
