MEMPHIS, Tenn. — A 19-year-old Memphis woman is out on bond after she was arrested and charged with vehicular homicide in the death of high school, college and professional basketball player and coach Galen Young.
Young, 45, was killed in June when a car plowed into his mother’s home on Horn Lake Road in southwest Memphis. Family members said Young was sitting in front of a computer when a car flew off the road and crashed into the house.
Miracle Rutherford has been charged with vehicular homicide, failure to exercise due care and driving without a license and insurance. Records show she was arrested Friday and later posted $30,000 bond.
Crash investigators said Rutherford was driving 61 mph in a Mitsubishi Galant when she ran off the road, went airborne, and crashed into the side of the house around 2:45 a.m. June 5, according to a police affidavit. The speed limit is 45.
Young was found unresponsive underneath the vehicle. Family said they didn’t know he was inside the house until they began searching through debris after the crash and made the gruesome discovery.
“Just the vision, the image of my brother, is just something you can’t forget,” his sister, Tammy Young, said. “If he had just been a few minutes late, I would not have known the name of Miracle Rutherford, I wouldn’t have known that this would’ve happened to my brother.”
Young was remembered in his published obituary as a star player on the basketball teams at Hillcrest High School in Memphis, Northwest Mississippi Community College and University of North Carolina-Charlotte, where he was named Conference USA MVP in 1999 after the team’s conference title win.
He was a second-round draft pick for the Milwaukee Bucks and later was an assistant coach at Lane College in Jackson, Tennessee.
“It’s still surreal,” Tammy Young said. “I wish that it would’ve never happened. But it did and now we just have to make sure the person responsible is held accountable for it.”
Rutherford was scheduled for a video arraignment in a Memphis courtroom Monday. She is due back in court in November.
