At 9:14 on a Tuesday night, Braxton Dollinger made a turn. It was the kind of move drivers make a hundred times without thinking — pulling out of a stopped position, swinging northeast from Main Avenue onto East Rosser Avenue. Routine. Forgettable. Except that on this particular night, at this particular intersection in Bismarck, North Dakota, that turn placed his Ford pickup directly in the path of a Kawasaki motorcycle, and by the time emergency responders arrived, a 19-year-old named Kallen Omen was dead on the pavement.
Dollinger, also 19 and a Bismarck resident, had reportedly been stopped at the intersection of Main Avenue and East Rosser Avenue before initiating the turn. Omen, riding his Kawasaki westbound on Main, struck the rear passenger side of the truck. The impact was brutal and immediate. Motorcycles don’t absorb collisions — they transfer every ounce of force directly to the person on top, and at intersection speeds, that is almost always catastrophic.
Omen was pronounced dead at the scene. Dollinger survived. And now two families — one in Sheyenne, one in Bismarck — are living in completely different versions of the same nightmare.
The Bismarck Police Department traffic unit responded to the crash and has been working the scene and its aftermath ever since. At this point, investigators have not determined whether any traffic violations were involved. That’s not a detail to gloss over. It means the full picture of what happened between the moment Dollinger began that turn and the moment metal met metal is still being reconstructed, second by second, from whatever evidence the street left behind.
What makes this crash particularly hard to sit with is the age of everyone involved. Dollinger is 19. Omen was 19. Two teenagers at the same intersection at the same moment, and only one of them walked away. There’s no comfortable framing for that. There’s no way to write that sentence that makes it land any softer.
Bismarck investigators are still reviewing all available evidence and following up on every lead. Whether charges, citations, or any kind of legal consequence follow for Dollinger remains entirely in the hands of that ongoing investigation. The law will go where the facts take it, and right now the facts are still being gathered from a stretch of Main Avenue that most people in this city drive every single day without a second thought.
For Kallen Omen’s family back in Sheyenne, the investigation is almost beside the point. Their son, their brother, their friend rode out on a Tuesday and never came back. Whatever the police eventually determine about turns and traffic laws and right of way, none of it brings him home. He was 19 years old, and he is gone, and Bismarck’s streets are a little heavier for it.
