Loved ones are devastated after a DUI driver violently slams into a UPS truck, killing two people in South Los Angeles.
A vigil was held Friday night to remember the two victims.
The deadly crash happened on March 28 near Arlington Avenue and 29th Street in the Jefferson Park neighborhood just before noontime.
The male driver of a speeding black BMW sedan rear-ended a parked UPS truck. The violent impact sent the sedan airborne before it collided with several oncoming cars and cars that were parked on the street.
A woman in the front passenger seat and a man in the backseat were both ejected from the BMW. They were pronounced dead at the scene.
The suspect driver tried to run away after the crash, but was captured by good Samaritans who had witnessed the collision.
“I said, ‘Hey man, where you going? You just killed some people!’” recalled Carmichael Guillemet, one of the good Samaritans. “He said, ‘Chill,’ but I said, ‘Hey man, you just killed that girl,’ and he’s like, ‘What girl?’ and was completely out of it. And I said, “How could you be running away right now?”
Guillemet was cooking for himself and his wife when we heard the crash happening outside his home.
“I heard a loud boom,” he recalled. “It sounded like a grenade, a really loud explosion.”
He immediately walked outside only to discover a gruesome scene. A large amount of auto debris was strewn across the roadway and the suspect driver was attempting to flee.
“When he got out of the car, he kind of started stumbling around and he stumbled into a jog and then started running,” Guillemet said. “After what I’d seen, I just couldn’t allow him to get away with that.”
Guillemet and a group of neighbors chased after the suspect several blocks away and kept an eye on him until authorities arrived and took him into custody. He was taken to a local hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.
Luzelena Soria-Rosales, 18, who was sitting in the front seat of the suspect’s vehicle, had died on impact after being ejected from the car.
The suspect’s friend who was sitting in the backseat, Oscar Santos Farela, was found dead in the vehicle.
Police said the suspect had been driving under the influence at the time of the crash.
Footage of the aftermath showed just how violent the impact was, with the top of the BMW almost entirely ripped from the vehicle’s frame. A crater-sized dent was left in the backend of the UPS truck. Several other cars struck in the collision also sustained heavy damage.
“[The suspect] didn’t have accountability,” said Retired Sgt. Jose Suarez, the victims’ friend. “He didn’t have loyalty to his friend, for the girl sitting next to him. I don’t know what he was thinking.”
Suarez grew up with Farela and said he was speaking to him on the phone just before the fatal crash. He said Farela’s last moments sounded chaotic.
“Something along the lines of, ‘Slow down, calm down, you’re going too fast,’” Suarez recalled. “It sucks because deep down, you knew his life was in danger.”
Suarez said Farela’s mother had just passed away three months ago so his family is overwhelmed with grief right now.
The suspect’s identity was not released as police continue investigating the deadly incident. Authorities are scouring surveillance footage collected from nearby homes as the suspect could be facing murder charges.