Lee Rizor, 27, of Mt. Gilead, was operating a backhoe on the right berm when a tractor trailer drove off the right side of the roadway striking the backhoe.
The commercial vehicle flipped over and caught fire.

Rizor was pronounced dead at the scene.

The tractor trailer driver, Dwayne Allen Hill Sr., 59, of Ashland, Va., was taken to the Wexner Medical Center at Ohio State University in critical condition.

The crash is under investigation.

Trooper Chad Duzan pulls his state highway patrol cruiser onto the median of Interstate 71.

“My radar is mounted on the outside of the car,” Duzan says. “It makes it a lot easier to watch the vehicles and get a speed estimate.”

Duzan also uses a hand-held laser speed detector which can track cars and trucks as they approach or drive away.

“We all have our standards on what we start stopping cars at. We all give a buffer zone. It’s unwritten and unsaid,” Duzan says.

After more than an hour, Duzan clocks a Buick traveling at 83 miles per hour. With his blue lights flashing he pulls the car over and writes the driver a ticket.

“He had assumed it was a 70 miles per hour speed zone; just heading to Columbus from Lexington, Kentucky. He had his grandkids in the car. 18 miles per hour over the posted limit I feel that that’s well beyond reason,” Duzan says.

While Duzan and other troopers patrol the interstates, higher speed limits raise the larger issue of a potential increase in traffic injuries and even fatalities. Anne McCartt of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety says that’s the downside to driving faster.

“When speed limits go up, speeds go up and eventually they will exceed the new speed limit,” McCartt says. “And eventually, crashes, more injuries, more deaths will occur.”

State Sen. Gayle Manning argues that that’s not necessarily the case. She says better road design and safer cars allow for higher speeds.

“We had heard from many of our constituents, many businesses that we needed to be more competitive. There are already 35 other states that are at least 70 if not 75 and money is time and people are trying to get to work a little bit quicker and they’re trying to get their supplies a little bit quicker and so we really had not had a lot of push back from anyone on this,” Manning says.

Along I-71 between Cincinnati and Columbus, as Trooper Duzan looks for speeders, a display on the dash shows that most of the traffic is moving along at about 65 miles per hour. An occasional vehicle drives past at 70. McCartt says a new 70 mile per hour speed limit will simply tempt some drivers to drive 75.

“When the speed limit is raised people will set a new target because most people believe, probably pretty accurately, that they’re not going to get a citation until they’re exceeding the speed limit, let’s say, by five miles an hour. People don’t think they’re going to get a ticket if they’re going a little bit above the speed limit,” McCartt says.

But Sen. Manning says she’s heard nothing about the increased risks of driving faster. She says improvements in auto and road safety make higher speeds feasible.

“Our roads are safer, they’re rural areas, you know like on 71. You know, there’s nothing around there. Our cars are safer; they’re just made better,” says Manning.

The Ohio Department of Transportation has already begun studying which sections of rural interstates will be raised to 70 miles per hour. ODOT says new speed limit signs will be installed on July 1st.

The patrol says heroin seizures increased 327 percent in the first half of the year compared to the first six months of 2011.

Marijuana seizures were up more than 100 percent, and overall drug seizures were up about 30 percent.

Franklin county led the state with 310 drug arrests in the first half of the year.

The patrol says there were 1,015 traffic fatalities last year. That’s down from 1,080 traffic deaths in 2010 and 1,022 in 2009, the lowest total since record-keeping began in 1936.

The patrol sees a link between the decrease in deaths and its stepped-up enforcement targeting impaired drivers.

But the pace of traffic deaths this year has been on the rise, and the patrol is urging drivers to be more cautious to help reverse that trend. There have been 487 fatalities confirmed so far this year, compared with 465 at this time last year.

Four people were killed during the Fourth of July holiday period this week.

The patrol says someone called to report suspicious activity by a commercial tractor-trailer along Interstate 70.

Troopers stopped the truck for a driving violation early this morning and discovered 32 kilos of cocaine in the sleeper area.

Prosecutors say Benjamin Richardson deceived lenders into giving loans that he never paid back, then filed for bankruptcy without reporting income he received from a nightclub he co-owned with a narcotics trafficker.

He was also convicted of one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, four counts of wire fraud, and two counts of making false statements

Richardson was ordered to pay restitution of $617,600 to lenders he deceived through the mortgage fraud.

Richardson was a trooper with the Ohio State Highway Patrol when he was charged and resigned when the charges were returned.

A patrol dispatcher says no major traffic tie-ups were being reported on Ohio highways as of early Saturday afternoon.

Memorial Day weekend is traditionally a dangerous period on Ohio roads, particularly for impaired driving crashes. The patrol says five of the 14 people killed on Ohio roadways the last Memorial holiday were involved in alcohol-related crashes.

Motorists should be reminded that wearing a safety belt is the single most effective tool in reducing injuries and deaths in crashes.

The patrol also urges all drivers to report impaired drivers.

Troopers have begun by training a group of Wal-Mart truck drivers in Grove City. The patrol hopes to enlist the aid of a lot of trucking companies in its Truck Shield program.

“The four areas that we are training the drivers in are impaired driver detection, illegal drug interdiction, homeland security and human trafficking,” says Patrol Lieutenant Anne Ralston.

Ralston says truckers should be alerted to a potential threat if someone inquires about their route especially if they’re carrying hazardous cargo. She says human trafficking in Ohio, especially with girls ages 12 to 15, is a growing problem.

“If you see a person that appears to be in fear of the person that they’re with; if the person doesn’t have identification or doesn’t know where they are, those are certainly signs that we would want people to pick up on and then report those to the patrol,” Ralston says.

Lt. Ralston says the sheer number of truck drivers on the road can help make Ohio safer.

“It’s a logical partnership between the trucking industry and the Ohio State Highway Patrol. It’s something that we’ve had for a long time and look forward to doing in the future,” Ralston says.

The patrol will staff 24/7 operations in Hamilton, Cuyahoga and Franklin counties beginning June 3. The changes are part of a larger effort to more efficiently organize patrol resources and some existing positions to better crack down on dangerous driving. It’s putting more of the nearly 1,500 troopers on patrol and in the areas with the most crash fatalities and impaired motorists.

The three counties with new metro posts have accounted for more than 170 fatal crashes in each of the past two years, or more than 15 percent of the statewide total.

The Ohio State Highway Patrol reports that 2,079 felony stops were made between January and July of this year. Franklin County led the state with 171 arrests, followed by Scioto County with 109, Lorain County with 70 and Jackson and Lucas Counties with 65 each.

According to the Highway Patrol, 74 percent of the arrests come from a trooper “looking beyond the license plate” to spot criminal activity, such as evidence of drug use. Patrol superintendent Col. John Born said increased vigilance is taking drugs, weapons and dangerous drivers off Ohio’s streets.

The majority of those arrested were charged with a drug offense or operating a vehicle while intoxicated.