Kate Gladdin’s meeting was only supposed to last an hour.
In the meantime, her mother, 65-year-old Julie Fitzsimons, opted to tag along and do some shopping in downtown Sheridan while her daughter worked.
Julie and her husband Vince — Gladdin’s father — had come from Sydney, Australia, to visit Gladdin and her husband Nate. It was their second trip to Sheridan, and much like their daughter, they had grown quickly fond of the close-knit community nestled beneath the Bighorn Mountains.
It was May 28, 2025, a beautiful sunny Wednesday in late spring, and they’d been in Sheridan for less than a week.
A few days before, they had caught the annual Eaton’s Ranch Horse Drive, watching as nearly 200 horses came thundering through the heart of downtown.
The plan was to meet back at Gladdin’s car at about 1 p.m., but when Gladdin arrived at 1:07, she found no one waiting.
She tried her mother’s cellphone. No answer.
She called again. Still nothing.
She told herself there had to be an explanation.
Maybe “mum” had left her phone at the house or wandered somewhere and lost track of time, Gladdin rationalized.
Maybe she had simply gotten turned around or potentially tripped and scraped her knee.
“I thought some lovely person might be helping her, and she just lost track of time,” Gladdin said.
Not Again
But when she turned the corner, Gladdin’s heart stopped.
North Main Street was blocked off and teeming with police cruisers. Blue-and-red lights throbbed as the sirens blared.
Gladdin’s first thought was that this couldn’t possibly be happening again. But it was. Something had happened to her mother.
She knew it the same way she had known about her sister Nicole when Nicole was hit on a road in Thailand more than a decade ago.
It was too much for her to process.
Fortunately for Gladdin, a friend she had been in the work meeting with was suddenly at her side, helping her to maneuver through the crowd to find out what happened.
Gladdin kept thinking it was a fall, maybe. A broken hip. Something manageable.
It wasn’t.
Fitzsimons had been hit by a pickup as she crossed the street and was thrown more than 7 feet.
She was unresponsive when the paramedics arrived, and by the time Gladdin reached the hospital — father and husband still somewhere on their way — her mother was already gone despite efforts to save her.
Following Rules
First her sister. Now her mother. Both killed in traffic accidents abroad was too much to fathom.
Nicole had traveled to Thailand in 2012, where she and her partner were struck while riding a motorcycle.
Nicole was not wearing a helmet and died of head injuries. She was 24, an accomplished dancer and on the verge of starting a job as a sports journalist at a news network.
In the wake of Nicole’s death, Gladdin and her mother founded the Nicole Fitzsimons Foundation, which provides financial support to aspiring performing artists and athletes who need assistance pursuing their goals.
The foundation also promotes travel safety abroad, a cause made bitterly ironic by what would later happen to Gladdin’s mother.
By all accounts, Fitzsimons had followed the rules.
According to a crash reconstruction report by the Wyoming Highway Patrol, Fitzsimons pressed the walk button twice and waited for the signal before stepping into the crosswalk at the intersection of West 5th Street and Interstate 90 at 12:16 p.m.
David Vincent Johnson, 34, was rounding the corner in a 2001 Dodge Ram 1500 at about 10 mph on a green light when he struck her.
The impact threw Fitzsimons about 7.5 feet. She fell and struck the back of her head, dying from blunt force trauma.
A big puddle of blood remained on the road when Gladdin arrived, along with her mother’s necklace and bottle of hand sanitizer.
Johnson’s bloody shirt was also there, having been used to try to stop the bleeding.
Haunting Image
Both Johnson and a witness recounted that Fitzsimons put up her hands up before the pickup slammed into her, which is an image that haunts Gladdin.
“It shatters my heart every time I think about her turning at the last second to try and protect herself,” she said. “She deserved so much better than her last moment on earth being one of so much fear.”
There was no discernible damage to the pickup other than a faint abrasion mark on the front bumper.
Johnson told police he had been on his way to get food at Los Tacos and had not seen Fitzsimons as she stepped into the street, according to the official accident report.
At the time of the crash, Johnson was not impaired, and the investigation would later show that he had not been on his phone texting or calling.
A WHP reconstruction of the incident determined that the corner was well marked and there were no obstructions to block a driver’s view, so Fitzsimons would have been clearly visible to the driver when rounding the corner, the report states.
Though Gladdin was repeatedly told in the aftermath that this was a dangerous corner, this was the first reported death there.
“There are no other pedestrian incidents that have ever been recorded on that specific crosswalk, so every other driver has managed to obey the rules there and prevent something like this happening,” she said.
In the end, Johnson was charged with vehicular manslaughter, a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in county jail and a $2,000 fine. He was also charged with failure to yield to pedestrian signals, also a misdemeanor.
Johnson initially pleaded not guilty to both charges but later changed his plea to guilty.
Under his plea arrangement, Johnson is facing a maximum of 60 days in jail at his sentencing in late May in Sheridan County District Court, though the judge has the discretion to rule within the full extent of the law.
Gladdin said she and her family were in support of the plea deal because they wanted to preserve the dignity of Fitzsimons’ life and not be forced to drudge up all the painful details of her death in a trial.
The Burden Of ‘Reckless’
That said, the leniency of the sentence has been hard for the family to stomach, Gladdin admitted.
However, the prosecutor’s hands are tied given that the way the law is written does not allow for any discretion, she said.
In Wyoming, vehicular manslaughter, defined as homicide by a vehicle, can be either a misdemeanor or felony.
To be considered a felony, the driver has to be driving recklessly or be under the influence of drugs or alcohol.
The difference between the two charges is a year in jail or up to 20 years in prison.
Johnson was sober, and as Gladdin was told, meeting the standard of “reckless” is a high bar.
According to state statute, reckless is defined as consciously disregarding a substantial and unjustifiable risk that a death will occur.
“In the words of one prosecutor, the driver would essentially have to be doing 100 mph down Main Street with police chasing them,” Gladdin said.
Though no punishment will bring her mother back to life, Gladdin acknowledged, she also feels that Johnson exhibited an escalating pattern of behavior given his prior offenses, which had no relevance on the current charge.
Prior Offenses
At the time of the accident, Johnson was on probation for domestic battery and evading police in 2024, according to court records.
He pleaded no contest to the charges and was sentenced to 90 days in jail with 88 days suspended and a year probation with six months supervised, as well as under $1,000 in fines.
Johnson also had a DUI in December 2023 in which he crashed his vehicle, and a handful of other driving violations that warranted his designation as a high-risk driver by the state of Wyoming, requiring him to carry SR-22 insurance.
A decade earlier, Johnson was also sentenced to four years supervised probation for a third-degree sexual abuse of a minor, court documents state, as part of a plea agreement.
Johnson could not be reached for comment as a phone number listed for him is no longer in service.
Gladdin said she doesn’t want sympathy for her mother’s death, but much like her sister’s death, she’d like to see some impactful change for the sake of public safety.
Drafting Change
To that end, she brought her case to Wyoming legislators, advocating for amendments to the state’s vehicular homicide laws that would give prosecutors broader discretion to pursue felony charges in deaths like her mother’s.
The effort gained traction.
Rep. Marilyn Connolly, R-Buffalo, agreed to sponsor the measure, and the Wyoming Joint Judiciary Committee voted to take it up as an interim study priority.
Gladdin has appeared twice before the committee, including May 12 when she testified alongside Michael Kusiek, executive director of Wyoming Pathways, a nonprofit dedicated to developing and maintaining safety on trails and roadways.
Kusiek asked the committee to consider closing what he and Gladdin consider to be gaps in Wyoming’s vehicular homicide statute.
This includes distracted driving involving texting or phone use that results in deaths, driving on a suspended or revoked license, fleeing law enforcement that leads to a fatality and considering repeat traffic offenses such as prior reckless driving convictions for those who kill a person while behind the wheel.
Expanding the threshold of what constitutes felony behavior, they argued, would give prosecutors more discretion in charging crimes.
The committee voted unanimously to ask the Legislative Service Office draft perfunctory legislation based on the points raised to discuss at their next committee meeting in Casper on Aug. 10-11.
Gladdin told Cowboy State Daily that she appreciates the committee’s efforts and sees it as a step forward in giving prosecutors greater leniency in considering documented aggravating factors.
Those should have been considered in her mother’s death, she said.
Legacy Lives On
She’s now gearing up for Johnson’s sentencing on May 29, which coincidentally falls a year and a day after her mother’s death.
Gladdin is also literally taking the issue to the streets by launching Sheridan’s first Community Pedestrian Awareness Walk on May 30 in honor of her mother and others who have been killed while walking on the streets.
This is part of her larger effort in collaboration with the city of Sheridan and other partners to raise awareness about pedestrian safety.
Wyoming saw an 83% uptick in pedestrian fatalities between 2017 and 2021, according to WYDOT, which was the second-worst in the nation.
Of those, 74% were in urban areas like downtown Sheridan with more than half of them happening during the daytime.
Along with Fitzsimons’ death in Sheridan, 83-year-old Thermopolis resident Bernadine Blacketer was killed while walking to church in January 2025.
Memory Lives On
More than the upcoming walk and legislative efforts, Gladdin has found comfort in the stories people shared about her mother during her time in Sheridan — stories told by those who came out to celebrate her life.
Fitzsimons was a librarian and avid history buff who, much like her daughter, had fallen for the warmth of the Sheridan community and the beauty of the surrounding mountains.
Gladdin and her husband, Nate, moved to Sheridan in 2023 after falling in love with the area on a previous vacation.
“I remember thinking this town couldn’t be for real,” Gladdin said.
Knowing her daughter and son-in-law had found their home, Fitzsimons threw herself into the community, signing up for a gardening class to learn which plants thrived in the region.
Gladdin would later discover that her mother had also spent hours at the Sheridan library reading about the West.
“She really embraced where I live now, and I guess that makes it so bittersweet,” Gladdin said.
On their last shopping trip together, Gladdin found herself smiling as she watched her mother strike up conversations with shop owners and warmly greet people who already knew her by name.
“She was so friendly and full of life,” Gladdin said.
Gladdin holds close the memories of those final days, including the night before her mother died, when the two of them stopped to have their photo taken under a rainbow.
Now, her mother’s name has been added next to her sister’s in the foundation that she once helped Gladdin operate. That both died from the same injury — blunt force trauma to the back of their heads as a result of reckless drivers — is not lost on Gladdin, who plans to keep their memories alive through her work and public speaking.
Her family has also established a college scholarship at Sheridan College, the Julie Fitzsimons Legacy Fund, for students in performing arts and sports who are experiencing financial hardship and personal adversity.
In this way, their legacies live on, Gladdin said.
“I'll never comprehend how something can happen twice to one family,” she said, “but I'll be damned if don't do all I can to create change for the better in honor of their legacies.”
Jen Kocher can be reached at jen@cowboystatedaily.com.
