Five teenagers were hurt, two of them critically, in a violent, high-speed crash and ensuing car fire Monday night in Harwich, Massachusetts.
The crash happened before 11 p.m. Monday, around the intersection of Queen Anne Road and Rebecca Road, where firefighters said that a car went off the road, drove through a guardrail and caught on fire.
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When police responded, four people were outside of the car, and a fifth was still inside. Police used a fire extinguisher to knock the flames down and were able to get the fifth person out, according to Harwich fire.
As firefighters arrived, the car was fully involved, but crews were able to quickly extinguish the car fire.
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The driver, an unidentified 18-year-old, will face charges in the crash, police said Tuesday.
One of the teens who was in the car said the occupants are a mix of current students and recent graduates of Nauset Regional High School, all of them between the ages of 17 and 18. They were driving to a friend's house up the street when they crashed.
Harwich police said the BMW passed two of their officers going between 60 and 80 mph on the winding road before speeding up. One passenger in the car told NBC10 Boston the speedometer read 130 mph before the driver lost control and crashed through the guardrail and metal gate, causing the car to roll multiple times before bursting into flames.
“It just shows that anything can happen at any given moment, like, it’s terrifying,” said Lilly Pooler, whose brother was one of the people in the car.
She said her brother, the driver and another male friend were able to crawl from the wreckage on their own.
But the two Harwich police officers they had passed just moments earlier had to pull two girls from the car's backseat as the fire spread.
Had they not happened to be at that spot at that time, who knows what really could have happened? The fire could have gotten worse. I don’t even want to think about what could have been," Harwich Police Lt. Aram Goshgarian said.
Police applied a tourniquet to one of the girl's legs, and both girls were taken by medical helicopter to Massachusetts General Hospital with life-threatening injuries. The three other teens were taken to Cape Cod Hospital and are expected to survive, though two of them were undergoing surgery on Tuesday.
“They’ve all been friends for like ever, for as long as I can remember,” Pooler said. “So to see something like this happen to them is definitely devastating.”
Police say speed was definitely a factor in the crash. And they say while the driver will be charged, their focus right now is on helping the teens in their recovery.
