New Year’s Day Chaos In Newport News, Fatal Crash, Child Shot


New Year’s Day in Newport News, Virginia has already been eventful. By midday, there were four gunfire incidents leaving three people wounded, including a 6-year-old-boy. And one man is dead with other badly hurt in an early morning, single-car accident.

The fatality, reported by the Newport Daily Press, came at 1:38 am when police were called to J. Clyde Morris Boulevard and Diligence Drive where a 2008 Cadillac hit a utility pole. The car was traveling eastbound on J. Clyde Morris at such a high rate of speed that when it jumped a curb, it knocked the utility pole 30 feet away.

The mangled car then came to a halt, hitting second utility pole. That pole lodged inside the passenger compartment of the car.

The two occupants, both male, were trapped inside the vehicle. Firefighters and paramedics had to use sophisticated rescue machinery to extract the two men from inside the totaled Cadillac.

But for the driver, it was too late. He was pronounced dead on site. The passenger in the vehicle, a 31-year-old was pulled out with serious injuries, but they are not believed to be life-threatening. The identities of the victims were not released, pending notification of their families.

Not very surprisingly, alcohol as well as the car’s speed were factors in causing the accident, according to police.

But that wasn’t even the first incident in a New Year’s Day of chaos in the city of about 180,000 in southeast Virginia.

At 12:22 am police responded to a call saying a child had been shot on the 1100 block of 27th Street. The cops arrived to find a 6-year-old boy with a gunshot wound to his foot. The child was taken to the hospital. There was no word on the severity of the wound, other than that it was said to be non-life-threatening.

The boy’s mother told police that her son was struck by a stray bullet, though from where was not determined.

In a separate New Year’s Day incident, about 40 minutes after the wounding of the 6-year-old, a disturbance in the P.U.R. LUX nightclub at 11975 Jefferson Avenue spilled out into the club’s parking lot — and erupted into gunfire. When police showed up, they found a 20-year-old man with a gunshot wound to the posterior. They also found that bullets hit several parked cars.

Then, at about 1:30 am, police were responding to another report of gunfire near Circuit and Deputy lanes when the police car was hit by a bullet in the passenger’s side door. The officer in the car was not hurt.

Finally, there was a robbery at 6:20 am on the morning of New Year’s Day. A 24-year-old man was shot in the thigh by two men who stole his wallet and some other possessions. Again, the injury he suffered was considered survivable, according to the Daily Press.

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