She Put a Cyclist in the Hospital. Then She Was Ruled Legally Insane.

An Illinois judge found a hit-and-run driver not guilty of attempted murder by reason of insanity.

Andrew Tolle Jacqueline J. Wells
Knox County Sheriff's Department

Andrew Tolle surely had no idea of what awaited him when he set out for a bike ride on May 9, 2017. The retired police captain, 61 at the time, was pedaling on a rural road in Galesburg, Illinois, a small city about 50 miles west of Peoria. He was heading westbound, not far from a boat launch on Lake Bracken, when the trouble began.

Though many details of the case would be debated in court for more than a year, there’s seemingly no dispute about what happened next: A Galesburg woman named Jacqueline J. Wells pulled up next to Tolle in her red 2015 Jeep. She honked, yelled obscenities, and rammed Tolle twice, knocking him to the ground. Then she ran him over and drove away. Tolle would wind up in the hospital with a broken arm, leg, and pelvis.

But what initially might have seemed like a sadly unremarkable case of road rage soon took a different turn. Around the same time medical personnel arrived to treat Tolle, Galesburg police arrested Wells nearby as she dragged his bike under her car. At a preliminary hearing the following day, Wells shouted throughout the proceedings, reportedly calling the judge “Santa Claus” and other insults. Soon thereafter, local newspapers published Wells’s mugshot, in which she was smiling broadly:

Knox County Sheriff's Department

Thus began a most unusual legal case. Wells was indicted and charged with attempted murder, as well as six other felonies: aggravated reckless driving, failure to stop after a crash causing injury, and four counts of aggravated battery. She was found unfit to stand trial and transferred to a mental health facility, with the possibility that she could regain fitness within a year of treatment.

In June 2018, Wells was ruled fit to stand trial. But then in November, 17 months after the attack, a circuit judge found her not guilty by reason of insanity, citing doctor and witness reports. The remaining felony counts and other charges (a misdemeanor DUI and an assortment of traffic tickets) were likewise dismissed.

In short, a judge ruled that a hit-and-run driver—one who intentionally struck a cyclist several times before leaving the scene—was legally insane at the time, and thus not culpable. This suggests one of two things: Either Wells knowingly assaulted a cyclist and was acquitted under cover of insanity, or a clinically insane person was legally driving a motor vehicle and nearly killed someone in the process.

I spoke to three attorneys who specialize in cases involving cyclists, and none could recall ever hearing of such a result. Normally, they said, the burden of proving insanity falls to the defense. But in this case, the Knox County Assistant State’s Attorney, who was prosecuting, declined to rebut the judge’s finding.

Multiple calls to the State’s Attorney’s office in Knox County for comment were not returned. (Tolle could not be reached due to an ongoing civil lawsuit.) My legal sources were reluctant to speculate on Wells’s mental fitness or why the state’s attorney did not challenge the judge’s ruling.

“The only thing that makes any sense is that everyone absolutely agrees that it was the right move,” said Steve Magas, a Cincinnati bike attorney.

Andrew Tolle in 2016.

Robert Connelly, a courts reporter at the Galesburg Register-Mail and the only journalist who followed the full arc of the case, attended dozens of hearings over the past year and a half. He declined to give an opinion on Wells’s mental fitness, but did offer that he was “not sure she has any memory of the incident.”

If Wells was indeed legally insane at the time of the attack, it raises the question of why she was allowed behind the wheel in the first place.

“To state the obvious, if this woman had a history of acute mental illness or insanity, she should not have been driving and likely should have been in some sort of treatment facility to ensure she was not a harm to herself or others,” said Megan Hottman, a cycling attorney in Colorado. “But absent that type of precaution, she was left to drive and, unfortunately, to nearly murder a cyclist with her car.”

Though the criminal matter is resolved—Wells will remain in custody in a mental health facility and undergo a treatment plan that has not been made public—Tolle filed a civil case in November 2017 against Wells and her mother, who owned the Jeep. The suit, which seeks damages “in excess of $50,000” for pain and suffering, argues that Wells was not legally fit to drive and should never have been allowed to pilot the Jeep herself. Connelly said a hearing for the civil trial is scheduled for mid-January.

“If the victim is law enforcement, the response is typically quicker and more thorough.”

Putting aside specific questions about Wells’s mental state, the case also highlights a larger issue of how police and the courts deal with road rage against cyclists.

“From my perception, we have a different set of norms for how we judge violence on the road compared to other kinds of violence,” said New York cycling attorney Steve Vaccaro. “I haven’t seen an insanity plea like this, but I have seen plenty of cases where there’s a deliberate strike of a cyclist followed by this suggestion that road rage explains how it wasn’t a crime.”

Vaccaro added that he thinks Tolle’s past employment had a role in how this case played out. “I’ve seen so many cases of a deliberate strike that isn’t treated like a crime,” he said. “But here, because the victim was a former law enforcement officer, the process is flipped. All of a sudden, it’s an intentional strike.”

Magas agreed. “If the victim is law enforcement, the response is typically quicker and more thorough,” he said.

In a cruel twist, Vaccaro said, the insanity ruling may limit Tolle’s ability to find civil remedy with the insurance company that covered the Jeep. Insurance plans often have exclusionary clauses that say mental health incidents aren’t covered.

“The victim may not even be able to get real civil justice, which already is a poor second to criminal justice,” Vaccaro said.

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