It’s been almost a full month now since that pickup truck’s driver hit more than a dozen other vehicles in The Junction, and a few WSB’ers have inquired: What happened in this case? The night of the crash, investigators were looking into the possibility the driver might have been affected by a medical condition, but they also looked into possible “impairment.” We checked with the Seattle Police Traffic Collision Investigation Squad, which has eight detectives charged with investigating crashes citywide, and here’s what Detective Michael Korner tells WSB: The investigation of what actually happened is complete – there’s no question that one vehicle hit the other vehicles, and that police “contacted” the driver at the scene. So now it comes down to state lab test results on the blood drawn from the driver that night. Since the possibility of a medical condition was raised, Korner says, the lab will do a full analysis, and the results might not be back for two months, depending on the lab’s backlog. (If they analyze for alcohol only, he says, it takes up to one month.) Once the results are in, he then completes the case report, and it goes into the city prosecutor/court system for review and a decision on whether charges are merited. The driver was taken to the hospital the night of the crash, as was the driver of the first vehicle he hit, and some of the vehicles were severely damaged – this comment on our original report told one such story. (Photo credits: upper left, Mark Ammann; above right, Christopher Boffoli)
West Seattle, Washington
14 Monday
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