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Another Alberta gas station attendant killed in gas and dash near Thorsby

Oct 6, 2017 | 11:45 PM

THORSBY, Alta. — A gas station attendant was killed Friday afternoon after what police call a “gas and dash” at a fuel station in Thorsby, Alta.

RCMP Sgt. Corey Kyle said it appears a driver of a stolen truck was speeding away from the Fas Gas station without paying for fuel when the fatality occurred.

A witness from a nearby tire shop told CTV News he heard yelling and when he went outside, he saw a large white cube van driving away with the gas station employee hanging onto the passenger side mirror.

The witness said the van headed north for a distance before swerving, tossing the man from its side before running over him.

“He was on the side of the cube van, he may have been trying to stop the van, and it appeared he had fallen off,” said Kyle, who added a number of investigators were on scene and a crime scene analyst was reconstructing what happened.

The 54-year-old victim died at the scene.

Mounties were still searching for both the van, with a sign for Middleton Flooring Ltd. on the side, and the driver.

Ironically, it was not the only gas and dash the detachment dealt with on Friday.

They said in a news release they had arrested two people in a gas and dash involving a school bus that had earlier been stolen from the Rimbey area.

They also said the suspects are believed to have stolen a truck from a man who stopped to assist them on the highway, and to have stabbed another civilian whose car they tried to steal.

That driver suffered a cut which was treated on scene.

In August, a 22-year-old man was sentenced to 11 years in prison for a gas-and-dash that killed Calgary gas-station worker Maryam Rashidi, 35.

She was run over by Joshua Cody Mitchell when she tried to stop him from taking off without paying for $113 worth of fuel.

Rashidi and her husband had come to Canada from Iran in 2014. She had been working at the Centex gas station for just two weeks after being laid off from her engineering job during Calgary’s economic downturn.

Mitchell was convicted of manslaughter, hit and run and theft.

(CTV Edmonton, The Canadian Press)

 

The Canadian Press