A 2021 Chevrolet Silverado 1500, the same model year named in the Fort Collins affidavit. Representative image, not the truck involved. Photo: DestinationFearFan / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
The front camera on Van Lemaster’s 2021 Chevrolet Silverado classified four people on a Fort Collins sidewalk as “Pedestrian-Adult” when they were 23 feet from the bumper. According to a Fort Collins police affidavit, the truck’s automatic emergency braking was on and set to “Alert and Brake.” The accelerator pedal was at 99%.
Lemaster, 88, of Cheyenne, Wyo., was booked into the Larimer County Jail on Oct. 16 on one count of vehicular homicide, four counts of vehicular assault and two counts of reckless endangerment, Fort Collins Police Services said. Joshua Douglass, 33, of Denver, was killed. The charges are accusations, Lemaster is presumed innocent, and nothing in the affidavit has been tested in court.
The arrest affidavit, sworn by accident reconstruction officer David Kaes and stamped as filed Oct. 13, was posted by Denver7. Its pages are numbered “of 8.” Only six were released.
Mountain Avenue, Aug. 29
The 911 calls started at about 11:40 a.m. The Tour de Fat bike parade had just ended, and the affidavit says several hundred cyclists were heading east through downtown on West Mountain Avenue. Lemaster and a companion had eaten lunch at the Rio Grande after shopping at the farmers market. His truck was nosed into the diagonal parking on the south side of the street, between the restaurant and Walrus Ice Cream.
He had to stop and yield to the bikes while backing out. A witness told police a woman standing near the rear of the truck seemed to be trying to stop the cyclists, saying “We aren’t a part of this” and “We just want to leave.” The affidavit says that description could fit his companion, who was outside the truck.
The Silverado’s rear bumper hit the passenger rear door of a passing Nissan Altima hard enough to shove the car’s rear tires sideways, leaving scuff marks. Witnesses said Lemaster then “revved the engine aggressively,” “threw that thing in drive” and “squealed the tires.” The truck covered 58 feet in a left-hand arc. It snapped a handicapped-parking sign off its bolts and launched three bikes locked to it onto the hood of a parked Chrysler Pacifica, then hit the people on the sidewalk, broke the railing around the Walrus patio from its ground mounts and stopped against a tree.
Douglass was knocked down and dragged and was pronounced dead at Poudre Valley Hospital at 12:15 p.m. The woman standing with him was pushed into the railing, run over by the passenger-side front wheel and trapped under the truck with a broken pelvis and legs. Another woman went over the railing into the patio seating and suffered leg and facial injuries, including broken teeth. A man walking his dog with his wife had his foot run over and his ribs broken; she was knocked to the ground. Another man was hit by the driver’s mirror. A young child sitting with her family on the patio was knocked down when the railing gave way.
What the truck recorded
Police served a search warrant on the Silverado on Sept. 14 and downloaded its Airbag Control Module and Front Camera Module with Bosch’s CDR software. The ACM keeps five seconds of pre-crash data and logged the tree as time zero. Here is its timeline as the affidavit describes it:
- −4.5 seconds: the truck hits the Nissan in reverse at 11 mph, eight feet from its parking space, with the accelerator at 99%.
- −4.5 to −3.0 seconds: engine throttle rises from 19% to 68%.
- −3.0 to −2.5 seconds: throttle drops to 40%, which the affidavit says “could be explained” by StabiliTrak cutting power.
- −2.0 seconds: throttle back at 99%.
- −1.0 second: accelerator pedal at 0%, throttle at 50%.
- −0.5 seconds: pedal back to 65%.
- 0: the tree. Forward speed peaked at 21 mph, reached from a stop in under three seconds.
The 99% reading in reverse matters as much as the one going forward. At the hospital, Lemaster told an officer he had tried to back out three or four times before he “just gunned it” to get out of the parking spot. The affidavit treats the hard reverse followed by the hard launch as “willful and wanton disregard” for the people around him.
The released pages report the pedal at zero one second before the tree and at 65% half a second later. They don’t say where the truck was or who had already been hit during that second, and the affidavit offers no explanation for the release.
Why the brakes didn’t win
The camera module flagged Douglass, the woman beside him, the woman thrown onto the patio and a fourth person who is not among the charged victims. The truck was 23 feet away doing 9 mph. The affidavit converts that to 15 feet per second; 9 mph is closer to 13.2. Either way, that is about a second and a half of sidewalk. Investigators wrote that with full braking the Silverado would have stopped from 9 mph in less than six feet, and that “had LEMASTER not overridden the AEB, the vehicle would have been able to stop before striking the pedestrians.”
The override is in GM’s design. The owner’s manual for the 2019 Silverado 1500, the first year of the generation that includes Lemaster’s truck, says Front Pedestrian Braking works in a forward gear between 5 and 50 mph and can be set to Off, Alert, or Alert and Brake. Its warning box says the system may brake “suddenly in situations where it is unexpected and undesired,” and tells the driver how to stop it: “To override Automatic Braking, firmly press the accelerator pedal, if it is safe to do so.” The system treats a firm press of the throttle as the driver’s decision, whatever the reason for it.
On whether the system ever braked, the affidavit hedges. It says the AEB “would have been disabled” by Lemaster’s use of the accelerator. The released pages contain no brake-pressure reading showing the system braked and lost, and they don’t line up the camera module’s clock (it logs ignition-cycle time; the pedestrian event came 49.65 seconds after the truck was started) with the airbag module’s five-second window. Whether the truck tried to brake, and at which point in the timeline above, may be in the two missing pages or in the full download.
Federal rules won’t change this. NHTSA’s AEB standard, FMVSS 127, requires pedestrian-capable automatic braking on all new light vehicles by Sept. 1, 2029. In its November 2024 response to petitions, the agency wrote that manufacturers may suppress activations after “the application of additional throttle,” as long as the system avoids the crash under the rule’s test procedures. NHTSA’s star ratings have their own lag on driver-assist testing, which we went through when the Model 3 swept its five stars.
No defect, no intoxicants
An examination of the truck and its controls found “no known defects” that would have contributed, according to the affidavit. Lemaster, treated for a head injury, told officers he’d had one 12-ounce beer with lunch, that he is diabetic and that he takes several prescription drugs. He consented to a blood draw, and NMS Labs found no intoxicants. The released pages don’t say whether investigators looked at his blood sugar or any medical cause.
The affidavit never uses the phrase pedal error, and it doesn’t suggest Lemaster thought he was on the brake. His own account is that he meant to accelerate. Crashes where a driver did hit the wrong pedal follow a known pattern: NHTSA’s 2012 Pedal Application Errors study found a U-shaped curve, with drivers 16 to 20 and drivers 76 and older over-involved. We covered the young end of that curve after a viral parking lesson went wrong. The same study recommended educating physicians about medical conditions linked to pedal misapplication.
The charges and the court date
The homicide count is filed under C.R.S. 18-3-106(1)(a), the reckless-driving version of vehicular homicide, a class 4 felony with a presumptive range of two to six years in prison. The impaired-driving version, (1)(b), is a class 3 felony and isn’t charged, which tracks with the clean blood test. Each reckless vehicular assault count is a class 5 felony carrying one to three years. The two reckless endangerment counts are misdemeanors covering the man’s wife and the child on the patio.
Reports on bond don’t agree. Denver7 and KKTV reported a $75,000 personal recognizance bond with an order that he not drive any motor vehicle. Cowboy State Daily reported $75,000 cash or surety and said prosecutors had asked for $500,000. Lemaster is due back in court at 8:30 a.m. on Oct. 22 at the Larimer County Justice Center in Fort Collins.
When a camera has already classified a person in the truck’s path, should a floored accelerator still be allowed to cancel the braking, or should the software stop trusting the driver at that point?
Sources: Fort Collins Police Services releases of Aug. 29 and Oct. 16, 2026; Affidavit for Arrest Warrant, State of Colorado v. Van Edward Lemaster, Larimer County, filed Oct. 13, 2026; 2019 Chevrolet Silverado 1500 Owner’s Manual; NHTSA, FMVSS No. 127 (89 FR 93199); NHTSA, Pedal Application Errors (DOT HS 811 597); Denver7, KKTV and Cowboy State Daily court reporting.
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