Halloween night in Charlotte County took a terrifying turn when a driver sped through a trick-or-treat route, hitting multiple people on Friday. The incident left families shaken but grateful that the outcome wasn’t worse.<\/p>\n
The Florida Highway Patrol reported that 66-year-old Eugene Mandarino drove a Dodge Ram through Sandhill Boulevard, hitting several people before fleeing.<\/p>\n
“As soon as I sat her in the car, we heard a big dunk,” said Megan Denton, one of the victims. “He went into me a little bit because of the pressure from the truck.”<\/p>\n
Carmelo Rodriguez, who was also involved, was admitted to the hospital but fortunately did not sustain life-threatening injuries.<\/p>\n
“I’m in pain I’m on pain meds right now because of the incident, but I’m just lucky that it wasn’t worse,” said Rodriguez. “All the what-ifs, there’s so many what-ifs.”<\/p>\n
21-year-old Sawyer Benson, was struck while pushing his daughter’s stroller. His girlfriend, Isabelle Rivera, recounted his heroic actions.<\/p>\n
“My boyfriend was able to get up and walk at least a few steps towards me before he collapsed on the ground,” said Rivera. “There was no way I would have ever expected something like that to happen, especially to us.”<\/p>\n
Rivera expressed gratitude for Benson, who suffered severe whiplash but no broken bones or nerve damage.<\/p>\n
“I could not be more grateful for the partner that I found,” said Rivera. “I could not be prouder of him, I really couldn’t.”<\/p>\n
A 15-year-old girl was also struck. Her mother shared an update on social media saying her daughter underwent surgery and is recovering from several injuries.<\/p>\n
Authorities later located Mandarino at his home. He was taken to the hospital, and charges are pending as the investigation continues.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Halloween night in Charlotte County took a terrifying turn when a driver sped through a trick-or-treat route, hitting…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":29859,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[209,211,210,4250,3837],"class_list":["post-29858","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cape-coral","tag-cape-coral","tag-cape-coral-headlines","tag-cape-coral-news","tag-charlotte","tag-collaborator_gen_stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29858","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29858"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29858\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29859"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29858"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29858"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29858"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}