A single-car crash made for a bizarre scene on Seward Street downtown late Thursday night.
At about 11:30 p.m. Thursday, a silver SUV hit a curb and flipped in the air before landing on its side in the middle of the street, Juneau Police Department spokesperson Lt. Krag Campbell said. Both the driver (a 28-year-old man) and the passenger (a 25-year-old woman) were taken to Bartlett Regional Hospital and treated for non-life threatening injuries, Campbell said. Campbell did not name the two.
From what police on the scene could tell, the car was coming down Seward Street and struck a large concrete planter on the corner of Second Street and Seward Street. This impact caused the car to flip over and land on its side a few dozen feet down the road.
Campbell said the crash is being investigated as driving while intoxicated, but no arrests were made last night because the driver was in need of medical attention and toxicology tests had to wait. The initial report that came to police was that the driver appeared to be trapped in the vehicle, but responders were able to retrieve both people from the car.
Jessie Herman-Haywood, who lives in a nearby apartment, didn’t hear the crash but saw flashing police lights that led her to look down on the street. She was stunned when she saw the SUV on its side.
The SUV was standing on its side, having flipped its way down the street. She said that she and a policeman on the scene talked about it, both of them in what she called “crazy amazement.” She snapped a couple photos and thought about how fortunate it was that the scene wasn’t worse.
“I can’t even imagine how it flipped. … It’s amazing that it didn’t hit anything else in such a narrow area,” Herman-Haywood said.
• Contact reporter Alex McCarthy at 523-2271 or alex.mccarthy@juneauempire.com. Follow him on Twitter at @akmccarthy.
