87-year-old pastor from Central Kentucky dies days after Lexington car wreck
An 87-year-old pastor from Jessamine County has died days after a fatal collision in Lexington, according to the Lexington Police Department.
The crash happened Dec. 29 at the intersection Tates Creek Road and Hartland Parkway.
Lexington police Sgt. Guy Miller said two vehicles were involved in the crash and one person was entrapped. When asked what caused the crash, police requested that an open records request be submitted for more information.
Both drivers were sent to a hospital and one died Monday, police said. Fayette County Coroner Gary Ginn identified the victim as Donald Johns, 87.
Johns was declared dead at 8:21 p.m. at University of Kentucky Chandler Hospital, according to Ginn. His death has been labeled as an accident.
The Lexington Police Department’s Collision Reconstruction Unit investigated the wreck. Miller said the investigation has been marked as complete but it is being reviewed by the CRU.
Charges were not expected to be filed, Miller said.
Johns was a pastor at Trinity Community Church in Jessamine County, according to his obituary. He was also a U.S. Army veteran and retired engineer at IBM in Lexington.
“Please keep our church and pastor’s family in your prayers,” Trinity Community Church said in a Facebook post. “This has been a huge loss to us all.”
Johns’ hobbies were reading, spending time in the woods and woodcutting, according to his obituary. He had a son, a daughter and nine grandchildren.
The crash was one of 52 fatal crashes in Lexington last year. That is the highest number of deaths from crashes recorded in a single year in Fayette County since Kentucky State Police began tracking deadly crashes in 2010, according to online data from KSP. The only other time Fayette County recorded 50 deaths from wrecks in a single year since 2010 was in 2016, when 50 people were killed in 48 collisions, according to KSP data.
