Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Stolen car vaults tollbooth, crashes
High-speed wreck sends bodies flying; one lands on roof, others flung all over Turnpike; 3 dead, a fourth is critical
A stolen car careened over a 10-foot-tall tollbooth on Florida’s Turnpike on Tuesday, scattering the bodies of three men who died and a fourth who was critically hurt.
One man’s body landed on the roof of the toll plaza’s single-story administrative building and fell to a sidewalk. Another flew 100 feet over the toll lanes and a wall and landed in an emergency lane. Two bodies landed in toll lanes.
The car, stolen from a driveway in Miramar, came to rest on its roof after hitting a concrete barrier about 2:30 a.m. — on the northbound side of the Cypress Creek Mainline Toll Plaza, north of Commercial Boulevard in Fort Lauderdale.
The northbound lanes of the Turnpike were closed for several hours.
Killed were Matthew Farid Bryan, 17, and Kevin Farid Bryan, 18, brothers from Miramar, and an 18-year-old man from Hialeah Gardens whose name was withheld because police had not notified his family. In critical condition was Cesar O. Pina, 19, of Opa-locka.
None of the men were wearing seat belts, the Florida Highway Patrol said.
FHP Sgt. Mark Wysocky said the crash was one of the most horrific he has seen during his 36-year career.
“It was one of the worst ones, because of the circumstances and for the damage, and how the vehicle went over the tollbooth, and seeing the people that were ejected,” Wysocky said.
The owner of the 2012 Buick LaCrosse, Hector Jose Infante, last saw his car at 10 p.m. Sunday in his driveway, according to a police report.
Infante, who could not be reached for comment, lives in the gated Riviera Isles community, south of Miramar Parkway and west of Interstate 75. He discovered his car was gone Monday morning and called police.
Traffic homicide investigators have not calculated the Buick’s speed as it entered the tollbooth area. The sedan went sideways into an impact cushion and then into a concrete barrier before it scaled the tollbooth.
The Buick dislodged an air conditioning unit from the booth’s roof before it fell back to the ground, Wysocky said.
A toll worker was in a booth, but not in the one that was hit, Wysocky said.
“Obviously if they had hit a tollbooth with a person inside, that person could have been killed or severely injured,” he said.
Two of the four men were dead at the scene. Two were taken to Broward Health North in Deerfield Beach, where one of them died later Tuesday morning.
Investigators don’t think another car was involved.