The Road From Vegas to Laughlin

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on August 10th, 2004

There’s a crude cross by the side of the road, the members are fastened together with a coupla Philips head screws. It’s down a slight embankment, maybe about 12 or 15 feet from the shoulder. We asked the gal at the Chevron, the one just north of where Rte. 163 T’s into Rte. 95, if she knew where Kinison died. She said it happened in Arizona. There is little information on the internet, but this much we do know. On April 10, 1992, Kinison was headed to a gig in Laughlin when his vehicle was hit by a vehicle occupied by two men in their late teens.

The cab of their Chevrolet pickup was littered with beer cans as they tore down U.S. highway 95, swerving into oncoming traffic near the California-Nevada border. Moments after hitting Kinison’s Pontiac Trans-Am head-on, fatally injuring the comedian and knocking his new wife unconscious, one of the teenagers said: “God! Look at my truck!” (From the Los Angeles Times News Service, April 11, 1992)

We tried to find the spot on our way to Laughlin, but we weren’t sure about the exact location; we just recalled from the news reports at the time that it was between Searchlight and the border. We researched it a bit and, from what we could tell, the cross is probably marking the spot where Kinison expired.

BERRI’S COMEDY CLUB


Above is Berri Lee backstage with Brian McKim at Berri Lee’s Comedy Club, at the River Palms in Laughlin. The show is continuing for only one week more. We’ll post more, but we gotta go! Stay tuned!

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