The Chapel Hill Police Department is investigating a pedestrian death after a vehicle struck and killed a person on Martin Luther King Boulevard Thursday night.

Police say the collision happened around 9:40 p.m. near Perkins Drive, which is north of Weaver Dairy Road at the entrance to the Chapel Hill North shopping center. The pedestrian was pronounced dead at the scene, according to the release, while the driver of the vehicle remained at the site of the collision.

On Friday morning, Chapel Hill Police publicly identified the pedestrian as 77-year-old John Arthur Holman, who was a Chapel Hill resident.

Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard has been the site of several of Chapel Hill’s pedestrian-involved collisions in recent years. In September, a pedestrian in the road was struck and killed also near Perkins Drive and Chapel Hill North. In February 2020, a pedestrian died following a collision near the street’s intersection of Homestead Road. A few months prior, another was hit — not fatally — while walking in the road north of Perkins Drive. There are crosswalks at MLK Boulevard’s intersection with Eubanks Road and another at Perkins Drive, but not one near the entrance to Chapel Hill North between the two.

While police closed northbound lanes to MLK Boulevard in the hours following the crash, the road was reopened to normal traffic patterns overnight. Chapel Hill Police said Friday, though, that their investigation into the incident is ongoing.

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