Carson man killed crossing highway

A man struck and killed by a truck on Highway 395 Sunday night was identified as Eric Pryor, 48.

Pryor died about 11:30 p.m. after he ran in front of a truck driven by Joseph Labranch, 27, of Carson City, on Highway 395 just north of Clearview Drive, according to the Nevada Highway Patrol.

Sheriff Ken Furlong said it appeared Pryor was trying to beat the traffic on his way to his home at a Koontz Lane mobile home park.

He had been in the area for about four years, said Furlong.

In the 1990s, Pryor was in the news for being the self-proclaimed high priest of San Francisco Satanists, according to Metroactive, a weekly newspaper in the Silicon Valley.

Published reports indicate that while Pryor was planning a protest against a televangelist coming to San Francisco on Halloween of 1990, he converted to Christianity. A Metroactive article from 1995 dubbed him "The Witch Who Switched."

He was also profiled on an episode of the former television news show "Primetime Live" that focused on "exposing fraudulent televangelists," according to a San Jose Mercury News story.

The last story on him in the Metroactive said he was living in a home in the Santa Cruz mountains in 1998, "training a company of shamanic prophets to heal young people of sickness in body or spirit, including drug addiction," the media outlet reported.