A man was killed Friday night when he stepped in front of a moving SUV on Interstate 78 in Berks County, state police at Hamburg said Monday.<\/p>\n
The incident happened about 10:20 p.m. Friday in the eastbound lanes in Tilden Township, between the Shartlesville and Hamburg (Route 61) interchanges.<\/p>\n
Michael G. Gerhart, 35, of Brooklyn, N.Y., was pronounced dead at the scene by a Berks County deputy coroner. Gerhart died of multiple injuries, but a ruling on the manner of death is pending completion of the investigation, Coroner Matthew J. Stitzel said Monday.<\/p>\n
Stitzel said the preliminary investigation determined that Gerhart, formerly of Lebanon County, had been traveling westbound on the interstate when, for reasons currently unknown, he got out of his vehicle and tried to cross the highway. While crossing the eastbound lanes, he was struck by an eastbound SUV.<\/p>\n
Troopers from the Hamburg station said the SUV was driven by a 64-year-old North Carolina woman who wasn\u2019t injured. She was traveling in the right lane when the man entered the lane directly in front of the vehicle, they said.<\/p>\n
After impact, Gerhart was thrown onto the shoulder. The SUV sustained disabling front-end damage and came to rest on the right shoulder.<\/p>\n
Crews from the Hamburg and Shoemakersville fire companies and Hamburg Ambulance responded.<\/p>\n
The eastbound lanes were closed between the Shartlesville and Hamburg interchanges until about 1:30 a.m. Saturday while troopers investigated.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A man was killed Friday night when he stepped in front of a moving SUV on Interstate 78…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":163705,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[349,182,139,28,128,130,129],"class_list":{"0":"post-176706","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-reading","8":"tag-berks-county","9":"tag-local-news","10":"tag-news","11":"tag-pennsylvania","12":"tag-reading-city","13":"tag-reading-city-headlines","14":"tag-reading-city-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176706","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=176706"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176706\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/163705"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=176706"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=176706"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=176706"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}