At 6:25 a.m. on June 15, 2026, two sanitation workers were killed while working on Guanhe Road in Guannan County, Jiangsu Province.
They were not two strangers working the same shift.
They were a married couple in their sixties.
Local officials confirmed that both worked in sanitation. A nearby shopkeeper who knew them said they lived close to the scene.
According to Guannan police, a 23-year-old woman surnamed Hu was driving west along Guanhe Road when her car struck roadside vehicles and the sanitation workers. The two workers died, and one passenger in Hu’s car suffered minor injuries.
Police said Hu’s blood alcohol concentration was 145.7 mg per 100 ml, meeting the legal threshold for drunk driving. Drug driving was ruled out, and she was placed in criminal detention.
Those are the facts publicly confirmed so far.
As of August 11, I have not found a reliable public report announcing a final accident determination, prosecution or court judgment. The latest authoritative reports I could find still describe the case as under investigation.
That means there are still things the public does not know.
What charges will ultimately be brought?
What responsibility will the driver bear?
How will the families be compensated?
Will the final accident findings and court result be made public?
These questions should be followed until there is an answer.
But there is something we already know.
Two people went out before most of the town was fully awake to clean a road.
They were husband and wife.
They were both in their sixties.
They died together on the same road where they worked.
The police notice reduced what happened, necessarily, to a few lines: two deaths, one minor injury, a blood alcohol reading and a criminal detention.
A police notice has to be concise.
Memory does not.
The people who clean streets are easy to overlook because their work is most successful when nobody notices it. The rubbish disappears. The road becomes clean. Traffic resumes.
After this crash, Guanhe Road also resumed.
But one household lost two people at once.
That is why this case should not disappear after the first police notice.
The driver deserves due process. Responsibility should be determined by evidence and law, not by online anger.
The victims deserve something too: to be remembered as more than “two sanitation workers killed.”
They were a couple who had lived for more than sixty years.
On June 15, they went to work.
They never came home.
When the case reaches its final legal conclusion, that conclusion should also become part of their record.
Until then, the story is not finished.