The California Highway Patrol says a suspect who had committed a vehicle code violation — failing to display license plates — and then fled officers was chased throughout Oakland on Tuesday night, leading to a dangerous collision on a busy arterial street.
The suspect, identified by an Oakland police officer’s radio broadcast only as a Hispanic male, sped away from the intersection of 73rd Avenue and San Leandro Street, at the Coliseum BART station, according to a police radio feed that The Oaklandside listened to on Tuesday night just before those broadcasts were encrypted yesterday.
Driving a red Toyota Corolla, the driver then got onto I-880 headed north and eventually got off the freeway near downtown, where he ran a red light and collided with another vehicle at 17th Street and Castro Street. That second car jumped the curb, shearing off a fire hydrant at the corner of a Chevron station.
Several CHP officers jumped out of their vehicles, guns drawn, and apprehended the suspect and his passenger in the middle of the roadway on Castro Street, according to a witness at the gas station who spoke with The Oaklandside. The driver sustained minor injuries, according to the CHP.
It’s not yet known whether the CHP pursued the suspect the entire time or only part of the police action.
The Oakland Fire Department told KTVU that firefighters responded to the collision around 7 p.m. They attended to four patients, two of whom were injured. The OFD’s Fire Station No. 1 is located on Martin Luther King Jr. Way, around the corner from where the collision took place.
The witnesses told The Oaklandside the next day that a taco stand immediately to the right of the fire hydrant was destroyed by the collision, but the person attending the stand did not appear to have been physically hurt and walked away from the crash. We have yet to speak to the food vendor.
The names of the suspect, his passenger, or the driver whose car was hit have not yet been released.
Coins, torn plastic, and what appeared to be the remnants of the hydrant’s bolts still lay near the collision site on Wednesday afternoon.
Mayra, an attendant at the Chevron gas station, who asked that only her first name be used, told us that she spoke to the people who run the taco stand. They said to her that one of them was in their car, while the other, a woman, was crouched down at the time of the collision. Mayra said the woman saw the stand’s water pump fly over her head at the moment of impact.
Last summer, an Oakland public school teacher named Marvin Boomer was killed in East Oakland by a fire hydrant that hurtled toward him and his girlfriend when a driver collided into it at high speed after a CHP chase. That driver, Eric Scott-Hernandez, was being chased due to a “felony evading incident” and suspicion of driving a stolen car, CHP said, even though he later said in court that the car belonged to his mother.
The Chevron attendant, when asked how she was feeling the day after witnessing a major collision a few feet from where she works every day, appeared nonplussed.
“ I don’t know,” she said. “I am used to it. I was raised in Oakland.”
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