Birding C.S.I.

OK, this post is going to be a little bit gruesome, but it's something I came across last year and I find it fascinating.
I took the following photo last January, and have gone back-and-forth about whether I wanted to post it to my blog or not, but since I keep going back to it myself, I thought that others might find it interesting too. (For those of you that are a little more squeamish I am going to place the photo further down on the page so that you can skip it if you want.)
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

OK, so if you made it this far, you are either not squeamish, or I've piqued your interest.
As I said, I came across this scene last year, and there are several interesting aspects of it.
What we have here is a road-killed Cooper's Hawk with a pigeon firmly clenched in it left foot.

So now the Bird CSI part kicks in for me - how the heck did this happen?
One thing that I found a bit odd, was the location where this was found - which was on the snowbank at the end of one of the parking lots on the Parker River NWR (Plum Island). So the 'event' didn't happen there. Somebody must have 'tagged' these birds on the highway (I assume that it was at a higher speed and not at the 20mph refuge speed limit based on the amount of damage) then pried them out of their grill when they parked on the refuge.
I have two theories on what happened:
The first is: I wonder if the Coop had managed to grab the pigeon, but hadn't made the kill yet, and in the pigeon's struggle to escape got into traffic where the both of them met their gruesome end.
The other theory I have is that the Coop had already made the kill and had started dining (the pigeon's body cavity is opened, but the coop's isn't) and had tried flying off with the kill, but the weight was too much and it wasn't able to get out of the way of an oncoming car or truck.
In either case, the impact had to be pretty hard to 'blow out' the eye sockets like that.

Do you have any theories?