Police Pursuit Of Erratic Driver Ends In Fatal Crash On Route 100
LINTHICUM, Md. (WJZ)-- Out of control. A speeding driver refuses to pull over and winds up dead. Now we're hearing from frightened drivers who saw the whole thing.
Weijia Jiang has the eyewitness accounts.
People who shared the road with that man say they thought he was going to kill them and they say he acted like he didn't care.
Route 100 in Linthicum became a wild race course for one driver.
Police say before the man crashed, he was weaving through traffic, violently rocking the steering wheel, going more than 80 miles per hour.
"I really didn't know if I was going to survive that or not," said Heather Tuminello, a witness to the high-speed chase.
Tuminello, 23, is 9 months pregnant, due to give birth any day. She was on her way home from a doctor's appointment when the driver's pickup truck almost slammed into the car she was riding in.
"I was wondering if he was going to wreck into our car, we'd have to be rushed by ambulance," she said. "He's not even two inches from our car."
A state trooper tried to pull the driver over, but police say that's when he became even more erratic.
"At that point, the truck accelerated to speeds between 90 to 100 mph, passing in the median, passing vehicles on the left shoulder of the roadway," said Greg Shipley with the Maryland State Police.
Police say vehicles were veering off the road to get out of the way, others were slamming on their brakes in the middle of Route 100. With so much going on, police say it's a wonder more people weren't hurt.
"He was speeding out in front of 8, 10 cars at one point in time, he could have hit thousands of people and hit them all," Tuminello said.
Finally, the driver lost control of the truck, which ended up wrapped around a tree. Tuminello says it happened in an instant, but even now, she can't shake the images.
"I saw him out of the car, his arm was wrapped around the tree, blood all over his face," she said. "It's horrific, it's a shame it had to happen that way."
In a bizarre twist, police say the driver was not the owner of the truck. He was likely borrowing it. They continue to investigate what drove him to take such a deadly ride.
At this time, police are only identifying the driver as a white male.
