A Serious Accident in the Evening

Pam and I were decompressing over Jeopardy (on the TiVo) and getting ready for a late dinner when we heard a crash.

Then we heard another crash. It was, I thought, like thunder, but Pam later described it as a sort of scraping of metal. That would turn out to be the more accurate description. At about 8:10, a white truck came down the Eastern on-ramp to the Granville Bridge. That’s the one that is fed from the hill that starts at the intersection of Hemlock and Broadway and actually crosses 4th Avenue at about a height of 40 feet or so.

It must have been the wet street (it had just rained pretty hard after a week or so of oil and other grime on the bridge). The truck spun out, crashed through the railings (first crash), and went head-first down to the street below (second crash). When we arrived, along with all of the other stoney-faced neighbors and passers-by, it was clear that one passenger was either already dead or nearly dead. We could see his arm, but not his head, hanging out of the truck’s white cab, which was smashed nearly flat against 4th Avenue. The police and fire departments had already arrived (even though it had been no more than 3 or 4 minutes), and eventually pulled that passenger out. The other was covered by a tarp and had not extricated from the truck before we left and walked back home (a mere 500 feet away or so).

It’s been a violent week in the South Granville area. Earlier, on Monday at about 10PM, a policeman shot a chain-wielding guy who had already beaten someone else in the middle of 16th Avenue and Granville. As safe and peaceful we usually find our city (and that has been the case for the majority of the two years we have lived here already), it definitely feels like there has been a strange spike in death and mayhem.