This is a truly terrible story, so I’m actually going to take a moment to warn you right now that it’s really rough. If you don’t want to read about a rider’s likely very painful last moments on earth in the aftermath of a terrible crash, it’s OK to hit the Back arrow on your browser. We have plenty of other stories you can read that don’t involve a horrifying death like this one.
On October 24, 2025, the Pinal County Attorney’s office in Arizona announced that a jury had convicted a drunk driver of two Class 2 Felonies: Second Degree Murder, and Leaving the Scene of a Fatal Collision. The driver, Joel Stephan Goble, was convicted of driving his truck at a speed of over 100 miles per hour, directly into the motorcycle of Darrel Evans, who was attempting to ride home.
I’ll actually quote the release here, because it summarizes the issue neatly. It reads, “The defendant’s truck hit the motorcycle with such force that the bike and rider were pinned into the grill of the truck and pushed for over four thousand feet until Goble exited the freeway at Idaho Road and came to a stop.”
It goes on, “The friction from being pushed at such a distance caused the bike to catch fire as it was pushed down the road.”
If that wasn’t bad enough, part of the case also hinged on surveillance video that showed what Goble did next, after he finally stopped. By this time, the bike and rider were on fire, and yet Goble tried to pull both out of his grill before driving away or, as it was legally determined, “fleeing the scene.”
No calls to emergency services; no attempts to help the injured man. Just a quick move to leave the scene and pretend it never happened.
It’s then that Arizona troopers stopped Goble, and eventually were able to do a blood test to determine blood alcohol level (it later came out that he’d been drinking all day prior to driving his truck at high speed into Evans). His BAC was recorded at 0.132, several hours after the collision. This was far from his first DUI, too; he had several past DUI convictions and also had an active warrant out for his arrest for a different DUI incident. In Arizona, as in most other states, drivers with a BAC over 0.08% are legally considered to be driving under the influence.
What sentence did Goble receive for this heinous incident? 22 years in prison. But, as a local Apache Junction, Arizona (where the crime took place) group noted on Facebook, 22 years isn’t enough. After all, it’s 22 years that Evans and his friends and family won’t get.
As riders, we know we can’t plan for every contingency, and we can be as careful as we like, but we can’t control what drivers around us are doing, or thinking, or drinking. We can keep our heads on swivels, and we can look out for each other, and we can be ready to take evasive action the moment we see anything that raises the small hairs on the backs of our necks. And we have to hope that’s enough.
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