A New Hampshire woman will plead guilty to charges connected to driving into and killing two Mass. cyclists during a charity ride in Hampton, N.H. last year, WMUR reported.

Darriean Hess, 20, plans to plead guilty to manslaughter and second-degree assault. A judge told Hess on Monday that she had until Friday to decide whether to plead guilty or go to trial.

Hess, who was 19 at the time of the crash, was driving on Route 1A over the Neil R. Underwood Memorial Bridge when she collided with four cyclists. Elise Bouchard, 52, of Danvers, and Pamela Wells, 60, of South Hamilton, were killed. Uwe Uhmeyer, 60, of Essex and Margo Heigh, 54, of Danvers, were also injured in the crash. All four were participating in the Granite State Wheelmen Seacoast Century bike ride at the time.


According to prosecutors, Hess was under the influence of several drugs at the time of the crash and did not have a driver’s license. Cindy Shepphard, 49, of Brentwood, N.H.,plead guilty to supplying the drug fentanyl to Hess hours before the fatal crash, and is currently serving a three-to-six-year sentence.

Prosecutors said Hess was staying at Sheppard’s home. Sheppard gave Hess the keys to a 2002 Honda Civic, in which Hess was pulled over for speeding in a separate incident eight hours before the collision.

The Boston Globe profiled Hess earlier this year, which detailed a troubled childhood:

The details may never be fully understood by anyone but Darriean, and perhaps her family. They don’t explain what police say happened, or, certainly, excuse the tragedy, the horror, the grief, the blood; nothing could. But the long, hard meander of her life — both the life she chose and the one others had chosen for her — led her one day last fall to the span over the Hampton River, where police found her sitting in the driver’s seat of a Honda with a spider’s-web crack in the windshield, crying hysterically, as a crowd gathered.

A trial for Hess was set to begin in January, but Tom Rogers, widower of Hess’s victim Pam Wells, told The Globe he hoped Hess would take a plea deal, since it would spare his grieving family from enduring the pain of a trial.