An early morning car-truck crash Saturday caused the death of a driver in northwest Fort Lauderdale and is being investigated as a DUI traffic homicide, police said.
The incident caused a Comcast outage that affected 1,000 customers in the neighborhood, according to a utility worker.
Fort Lauderdale police did not provide the drivers’ identities, but acknowledged the person who died was a woman who died after being hospitalized.
“One driver died from their injuries at the hospital and one driver was arrested for DUI,” said public information specialist Casey Liening in an email. “This is an ongoing Traffic Homicide Investigation.”
At around 2:45 a.m., police and fire rescue workers responded to 911 calls about a gruesome wreck at NW 31st Avenue and Cypress Creek Road, a well-traveled intersection to the northwest of Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport.
“We arrived to find multiple vehicles involved in a crash, two of them with significant damage,” said Frank Guzman, public information officer for Fort Lauderdale Fire Rescue.
“Additionally, some utility lines were knocked down,” he said. “After an extended extrication operation, our technical rescue team was able to remove a woman from one of the badly-mangled vehicles. She was rushed to Broward Health North with severe, life-threatening injuries. A second person was transported as well, but with minor injuries.”
At 8:30 a.m., city police could be seen diverting east and westbound traffic along Cypress Creek Road to the north and south of the accident site along Northwest 31st Avenue. A damaged white pickup truck and a destroyed black Toyota Corolla had been loaded aboard separate flatbed trucks.
The Corolla had crashed through a fence anchored in the intersection’s northwest corner. Small broken remnants of the car’s body remained strewn on the ground.
By 10 a.m., the intersection reopened.
A Comcast crew worked to restore service to an estimated 1,000 subscribers, said a supervisor who declined to be identified. He said they had been on the job for six hours.
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