Rylie D. Hillegas had three kids at home and a wife who loved him. He was 24. Friday night he got on his 2002 Harley-Davidson Dyna Wide Glide and rode east on Baughman Hollow Road in Hempfield Township, and he never made it back. Just before midnight, the motorcycle hit a curve it couldn’t handle. The bike slammed into a guiderail east of Pandora Way. Hillegas was thrown from the seat. Medics got there, loaded him up, and rushed him to Independence Health System Westmoreland Hospital. He was pronounced dead by an emergency room doctor. He wasn’t wearing a helmet.
Westmoreland County Coroner John Ackerman confirmed the details Saturday morning. The cause and manner of death are still pending — they’re waiting on autopsy and toxicology results. What isn’t pending is the fact that a young man who’d barely gotten started in life is gone. He was a husband. A father. Twenty-four years old. His kids are young enough that when they grow up, their memories of him will come mostly from photographs and from whatever their mom can bring herself to tell them.
His wife remembered him publicly after word got out. She wrote that loving being a father was the thing he was most about — that it wasn’t just something he did but something he was. Family members and people who knew him filled social media with tributes. They called him devoted. They said he was always the first to show up when someone needed help. One relative wrote that he had a heart of gold. That’s the kind of thing people say, but in this case it sounds like they meant every word of it.
Baughman Hollow Road runs through Hempfield Township in Westmoreland County, a stretch of two-lane blacktop with curves that don’t forgive you when it’s dark and late. There are no details yet on how fast Hillegas was going or whether anything else factored into what happened. The Jeannette Police Department and the Pennsylvania State Police are both looking into the crash. That’s all anyone knows right now — a curve, a guiderail, a man who flew off his bike, and three children who will grow up without their dad.
Pennsylvania’s helmet law is clear for riders under 21, but once you turn 21, the law doesn’t require you to wear one. Hillegas was 24. He made the choice a lot of riders in this state make every single day. It’s legal. And on this particular Friday night on this particular road, it may have made the difference between survival and the outcome that came. Ackerman noted the absence of the helmet in his release. He didn’t editorialize. He just said it.
People are posting about Rylie Hillegas because to those who knew him, he was the kind of person worth posting about. A guy who showed up for his friends. A husband who was still young enough that he and his wife had their whole life in front of them. A father who loved the job of being a dad more than anything else on his plate. His youngest child is probably still in diapers. His oldest isn’t old enough to understand the word widow. That’s the part that hangs over all of this, heavy and quiet and impossible to fix.
The investigation is ongoing. No charges have been filed and none are expected given the nature of the crash, but police are still piecing together exactly what happened in the seconds before that motorcycle left the road. For now, Greensburg has lost one of its own. Hempfield Township has a guiderail with damage on it. And a family in Westmoreland County is trying to figure out how to get through the rest of the weekend, let alone the rest of their lives.
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