Crash Sends SUV Into Water Along Edens
UPDATED 05/31/11 6:07 a.m.
NORTHFIELD, Ill. (CBS) -- A man was in critical condition Tuesday morning, and faces DUI charges, after a rollover accident on the Edens Expressway.
As CBS 2's Susanna Song reports, the man's car flipped over the guardrail on the Edens late Monday night. The quick thinking of a passerby and a police officer might have saved his life.
He was later charged with driving drunk.
The man was trapped and submerged in an overturned sport-utility vehicle that landed in waist-deep water in a forest preserve.
Police say that vehicle and another car crashed around 11:30 p.m. Monday in the northbound lanes of the Edens just past Willow Road. The guardrail was left bent from the impact and where the SUV landed in the ditch near the Skokie Lagoons.
Victor Voskovsky happened to be driving by at the time, and rushed to the rescue.
"Basically, I was driving, and then I saw something was going on, so I stopped and I pulled over to the curb, and a car was flipped, so I ran to the water really quick, and the door was closed on the left side, but because it was underwater in the mud," Voskovsky said.
He rushed to pull the man out, and 30 seconds later, he said a Wilmette police officer arrived to help in the rescue.
"He was underwater for at least five minutes," Voskovsky said.
The officer administered CPR, and the man was taken away on a stretcher. But it didn't end there.
"We had no witnesses on the scene that there were only one person in the car so we had on duty divers respond and search the water just in case there was someone else in the vehicle," said Northfield Fire Chief Tom Burke. "At this time we searched the water, and we found no one else in the water."
There were two people inside the other vehicle. They walked away from the crash with no injuries.
The crash remained under investigation Monday morning. Police are not saying who was at fault.
