A motorist charged Monday with hitting a 65-year-old woman on the side of a Maplewood road and leaving the scene was driving without a license at the time of the fatal 2022 crash, according to authorities.

Adrianee Laruth Powell-Onwuji, 38, of St. Paul, faces criminal vehicular homicide in connection with the collision that killed Eri Nakamura of Oakdale. She was charged by summons and remained out of custody Tuesday.

Adrianee Laruth Powell-Onwuji (Courtesy of the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office)

She declined to comment on the charge when reached by phone Tuesday. “I just found out about it this morning,” she said.

A Minnesota Department of Public Safety spokesman said Tuesday that Powell-Onwuji’s license has been either suspended or revoked since April 2011, and that it’s currently revoked.

Nakamura had been walking south on the shoulder of Century Avenue (Minnesota Highway 120) near Fifth Street when she was struck around 7:35 p.m. Feb. 6, 2022, according to the Minnesota State Patrol’s incident report.

A day after the crash, the state patrol asked for the public’s help in identifying the suspect’s vehicle, which they said was a 2015 to 2020 silver Mitsubishi sport-utility vehicle with damage to the front and driver’s side.

The state patrol announced the next day that a tip led investigators to the SUV and the suspected driver, who was not named. Charges were pending, the state patrol said at the time.

Mark Haase, a spokesman for the Ramsey County Attorney’s Office, said Tuesday that it took time to bring charges against Powell-Onwuji because of the crash reconstruction and that investigators had to collect evidence related to her claim that damage to her SUV was unrelated to the fatal collision.

She’d been at a bar

Officers sent to the crash scene found Nakamura in the road surrounded by drivers who had stopped to help her. She was taken to Regions Hospital and died in the emergency room.

The drivers had moved silver parts of a front bumper and a fog light assembly from the road to the shoulder. Officers determined the parts at the scene belonged to a Mitsubishi.

A state patrol investigator received a tip from an unidentified caller about a driving complaint involving a silver Mitsubishi SUV that had front-end damage, according to the criminal complaint. The caller gave the investigator the license plate information, which showed the SUV was registered to Powell-Onwuji.

Troopers found Powell-Onwuji’s SUV at her St. Paul apartment building in the 300 block of Winthrop Street South, just west of McKnight Road. It had damage to the driver’s side front quarter panel and it was missing parts similar to the ones found at the crash site, the complaint says.

Troopers went to Powell-Onwuji’s workplace. She told them she had met a friend at Titan’s Sports Saloon at 1267 Geneva Ave. N. in Oakdale the night of the crash.

Powell-Onwuji said her friend was arrested for drunken driving shortly after leaving the bar and that her SUV was damaged while trying to push her friend’s vehicle. She said she got home around 8 p.m.

Powell-Onwuji did not recall hitting anyone. She was arrested. While being taken to jail, she said “something to the effect that she should have realized she had hit something,” the complaint says.

The parts recovered from the crash scene match the parts missing from her SUV, according to the complaint.

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