Shocking video shows a pickup truck accelerating wildly as it circled around a Huntington Park intersection and slammed into parked vehicles over the weekend, and officials said Monday they’re investigating the incident.
No one was injured after the series of collisions at the corner of Gage and Wilmington avenues around 1 p.m. Sunday, Huntington Park police said in a news release.
Investigators determined 75-year-old Jose Landazure lost control of his 1999 Ford pickup and hit four unoccupied vehicles. The release says it “seems to be an isolated incident.”
Alarmed bystanders can be heard screaming and urging others to run for safety in cellphone video provided to KTLA by witnesses at the intersection, which sits on the border with the Florence-Firestone neighborhood of South Los Angeles.
Surveillance video from a nearby business shows the dark-green truck begin smoking after it rams into the back end of an SUV parked outside an auto shop on the south side of Gage.
Alejandra Flores, who saw the crashes unfold, said the SUV was her father’s vehicle.
“Everybody started running everywhere,” Flores told KTLA. “His tires kept spinning and spinning and spinning.”
Landazure’s truck can be seen emitting a large amount of smoke after hitting the SUV. The pickup then reverses at a high speed and, tires screeching, backs across the intersection into the parking lot of the Plaza Americana strip mall on the opposite side of the street.
The back of the truck comes to rest against a pair of vehicles parked there before accelerating back through the intersection and slamming into the side of the white SUV it earlier made contact with.
“Somebody got to go take the keys,” a bystander is heard saying in cellphone footage.
Police said they aren’t sure about the extent of Landazure’s injuries because he refused medical attention and was released at the scene. It’s believed his family later took him for an evaluation, officials said.
According to Flores, Landazure may have been hurt by one of the bystanders.
“When his car finally stopped, there was a lot of people rushing to him and somebody punched him in the face,” she said.
Alcohol has been ruled out as a factor by both Huntington Park police and California Highway Patrol, according to local officials, but the incident remains under investigation.