Driver Kills Northampton Resident In Damon Road Homicide Crash
A driver inflicted fatal injuries to a Northampton man who was riding his bicycle on Damon Road in Northampton in a homicide crash that occurred on Saturday afternoon.
According to a press release from Northwestern District Attorney David E. Sullivan’s office, the killing occurred around 4:00 p.m. on Saturday afternoon near 100 Damon Road, just east of the Interstate 91 overpasses.
There, first responders found the victim, Devin Reade, 46, of Northampton, suffering from serious injuries, and transported him to Baystate Medical Center in Springfield.
Reade succumbed to those injuries on Tuesday.
According to the district attorney’s office, a preliminary investigation indicates that the vehicle and the bicycle were both traveling eastbound on Damon Road when the collision occurred.
The district attorney has not filed any charges against the suspect, and in their press release, prosecutors allege that the suspect “remained on scene and was cooperative with police.”
On Wednesday afternoon, Northampton Police announced that they planned to shut down Damon Road between the Bridge Street rotary and Industrial Drive to “allow investigators to follow up” on Saturday’s homicide.
Recent MassDOT road widening led to surge in crashes
Damon Road was recently reconstructed to add new sidewalks and bicycling infrastructure, but the project also dramatically widened the roadway in the vicinity of the crash scene.
In 2024, MassDOT completed work on a major reconstruction of Damon Road between Bridge Street (Route 9) and King Street (U.S. Route 5).
The project added a new separated two-way bike path along the west side of Damon Road, with a connection to the Norwottuck Rail Trail. But that path ends just to the east of the Interstate 91 overpasses, near the site of Saturday’s killing.
The MassDOT project also dramatically widened Damon Road between the I-91 overpass and King Street/Route 5, just west of the homicide scene.
That part of Damon Road used to be three lanes wide; now, it’s six lanes wide, with a painted bike lane running along the curb in each direction.
In the two years since the project’s completion in July 2024, MassDOT’s IMPACT crash database indicates that there have been 148 crashes along Damon Road, including 30 crashes that inflicted injuries to at least one victim.
18 of those injury-causing crashes occurred where Damon Road meets Bridge Street in a newly-built traffic rotary (the new traffic circle, which was also part of MassDOT’s Damon Road project, allows cars to drive through the intersection at relatively high speeds without stopping, and it replaced a traffic light that had previously controlled the intersection).
11 other injury-causing crashes occurred in the newly-widened segment of Damon Road between King Street and the I-91 overpass.
By comparison, during the similar two-year period between July 2017 and September 2019, before the MassDOT widening project, the state’s crash database records only about half as many crashes on the same segment of Damon Road.
Of those crashes, 16 resulted in injuries to one or more victims.
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