DETROIT – A man has died after a crash on the Southfield freeway following a chase Monday night.
Someone with MSP says they weren’t actively pursuing the car when the crash happened on Detroit’s west side.
“My husband thought it was a thunderstorm, and I said, no, that’s not a thunderstorm,” said a woman. “After a while, we saw all the lights. The lights had lit our house up, it was so many back there,” said one person living nearby who didn’t want to go on camera.”
What the woman was describing were the sounds that came with a fatal car crash outside the back of her home that killed an innocent man in their late 50s.
“There’s a person in there that’s dead right behind your house in a truck,” the woman said. “It was kind of a somber night. I had my granddaughter, and they were like, she don’t wanna see this.”
Her garage and fence are now damaged to the point where she’s worried about having to repair it herself. The driver, allegedly on the run from police, identified as a man in his 20s, only suffered minor injuries.
It’s the same scenario for her neighbor, who feels horrible for the life that was lost. The truck the victim was in crumbled like a can of Coke and ended up facing the opposite direction it was originally traveling.
“Oh, the truck was very balled up,” said a man. “It’s tragic, you know, and I prayed last night to see and make sure that anybody that was in this accident that there weren’t any lives lost or anything like that.”
Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened. Michigan State Police said it all could have been prevented if the driver on the run just stopped.
“It’s a tragedy that things like this just kinda happen,” the man said. “But we have a lot of accidents that come back on this service drive over here.”
Crashes happen in the area because people hardly stop at the stop sign, either coming off the freeway or the service drive. And with the stop sign now down, no one is stopping there.