Man charged 7 months after fatal North Bend hit and run

A recent Mount Si High School graduate has been charged with the fatal hit and run of a North Bend woman on New Year’s Eve.

Cody J. Eads, 19, will be arraigned on August 21 for felony hit and run in the death of 57-year-old Lucinda Pieczatkowski.

Pieczatkowski was struck and killed by a truck while walking on 394th Place SE, also known as Stone Quarry Road. According to the King County Sheriff’s Office, she got into an argument with a group of friends while returning from the Snoqualmie Casino and decided to walk home.

A broken headlight found at the scene led detectives to impound a 1988 Ford F150 pickup truck owned by Eads.
According to court documents, the truck had “damage consistent with striking a pedestrian, including blood and tissue.”

The challenge for investigators was placing Eads behind the wheel the night Pieczatkowski was killed.

Months after her death, members of the community told KIRO Radio that Eads was drinking at a party before the accident and later told friends what he had done. One woman, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said no one wanted to turn Eads in.

“It’s all very hush-hush,” she said. “From what I know from my child is that they know who did it but nobody wants to come forward and say anything because they don’t want to get him in trouble.”

The woman said she took the information she overheard to a detective, who told her that it was consistent with what he believed happened that night: that Eads left the party in Fall City and hit Pieczatkowski while drunk behind the wheel.

“He had a list of names of kids that were at the party and that he just needed one person to come forward to say that they could put this boy at the party and say that he was driving the car,” she said.

According to court documents, Eads called his girlfriend immediately after the accident and told her to come to his house.

“She commented that he was ‘bawling his head off and didn’t know what to do,'” according to the documents. “A friend drove to the defendant’s house and noted that his truck had significant front end damage.”

Following his mother’s death, Pieczatkowski’s son pleaded for anyone with information to come forward.

“Put yourself in my shoes and you’d want the person who did this to your family member to come forward as well,” Erik Pieczatkowski said on The Ron and Don Show. “Withholding bringing this person forward and not speaking to the facts is unbelievable to me.”

Eads graduated from Mount Si High School in 2012. In a player profile for his youth baseball club, Eads said he hoped to become a firefighter, “if that is possible.” He is a current student at Eastern Washington University.

In a post on his Facebook page Wednesday, Eads expressed remorse for what happened to Pieczatkowski.

Today I was charged with Hit and Run resulting in a death. I am sure most of you have heard what happened on New Year’s Eve.

I will never forget the feeling I had when I woke up the next morning and saw in the paper that a woman had died on Stone Quarry Road. I wasn’t sure what I had hit that night, and that is no excuse for not stopping but I want you all to know that if I had 100 percent known what I had hit I would have stopped
immediately.

Eads went on to write that he has contemplated suicide.

To me this isn’t about going to jail. Yes I might end up in jail but to me this is way more about feeling guilty. I can handle jail time because I am a man and I will face what I did head on. But the guilt will never ever go away and that is something I hope to god that none of you ever have to carry around with you. I am not a religious person, but I would like to believe that if god is real he let this happen in my life so that I can rise from the ashes and make myself better than I ever have been before.

I hope that everyone out there can learn something from this and try to remember that in the blink of an eye you can change your life so always be smart and always try to live life the right way. I think we all know what living the right way means, we just all need to do it because when you don’t tragedies happen.

If convicted as charged, Eads faces a standard range of 31 to 41 months in prison.