A change of plea hearing for Kenneth Wentworth Jr., 27, Hope was continued Monday after the court agreed to allow additional time for him to undergo a sanity evaluation.
Wentworth was arrested in January on charges of robbery, leaving the scene of a crash involving injury, auto theft and battery after a carjacking incident in the Columbus Regional Hospital parking lot on Jan. 1, court documents state.
Columbus police officers were sent to the hospital parking lot at 2400 17th St about a vehicle crash. When they arrived, they found that Wentworth had fled on foot after crashing the vehicle.
When officers arrived, Wentworth and a family member of the carjacking victim were in a physical struggle on 17th Street just off the hospital grounds, police said.
Police determined that Wentworth entered the unoccupied driver’s seat of a 2016 Chrysler Town and Country minivan and attempted to drive away, police said. The vehicle’s owner, Lorrie A. Crouch, 56, Hope, partially entered the passenger side of her vehicle and struggled with Wentworth, police said. Wentworth is accused of putting the vehicle in reverse with the passenger door striking Crouch’s 88-year-old mother, Sara smith, who was seated near the vehicle in a wheelchair, police said.
Wentworth then is accused of accelerating the vehicle forward and striking a parked car, causing Crouch to fall out of the minivan and strike her head on the concrete parking lot, police said.
Wentworth is being held in the Bartholomew County Jail.
For more on this story, see Tuesday’s Republic.
