A woman has been arrested hours after a 68-year-old woman was hit and killed while riding her bicycle on the Southeast 17th Street Causeway in Fort Lauderdale, police said.
Shortly before 7 a.m. Thursday, two men called Fort Lauderdale Police after seeing the woman lying on the bridge in the east bicycle lane with a mangled bike near her, according to 911 calls released Thursday afternoon.
One man told a dispatcher he was unsure how a driver could have crashed into the woman because she had clearly been riding in the bicycle lane. The car that hit her, a black sedan, traveled too quickly for him to catch the license plate number and drove away heading east, the 911 caller told the dispatcher.
The bicyclist, identified as Shelley Lewis, of Fort Lauderdale, was taken to Broward Health Medical Center as a trauma alert and was later pronounced dead, police department spokesperson Casey Liening said.
By 4:30 p.m., officers had arrested Don Janea Smith, 22, on one count of leaving the scene of an accident involving death, Liening said. The car involved also has been found and taken by police, she said.
The police department did not provide further information about the investigation leading to the arrest.
Smith has not yet been booked into the jail.
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