MIAMI - William Lacasse Jr. had just pulled out of a gas station in his mother's Corvette June 6 when two cars zipped by and flashed their hazard lights at the 17-year-old - a challenge to race.
Lacasse floored it.
Moments later, he crashed into a concrete utility pole and was killed - an early victim in a string of deaths around the country that some are blaming on 2 Fast 2 Furious, a movie about street racers released three weeks ago.
Illegal street racing has always been around, but police departments around the country are stepping up patrols around theaters for fear viewers will get in their cars and try to imitate the risky stunts in the movie, filmed in the Miami area as a followup to 2001's The Fast and the Furious.
Teenagers "think drag racing is a movie," said Miami police Lt. Bill Schwartz. "They don't understand that those people are stunt drivers, and that they can get killed."
Universal Studios said in a statement that any attempt to link accidents to its movie is unjustifiable and would "confuse cause and effect."
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said connecting crashes to drag racing is difficult but that the year the first movie came out, at least 135 people died in accidents from possible races - almost twice as many as in 2000.
Lacasse's father, a police officer, told television station WTVJ his son was on his way back from seeing 2 Fast 2 Furious. He would never have let his son borrow the car had he known where he was going, the elder Lacasse said.
At least two other Florida accidents have been blamed on the release of the sequel. A racing accident in Miami hospitalized two families. A young woman lay in a coma after being hit by racers earlier this week.
In California, at least two deaths have been linked to the movie, including that of a 15-year-old boy mowed down by a 13-year-old drag racer while playing basketball outside his home. In Georgia, a 17-year-old girl on her way to see the film died when her friend's car crashed in a race.
The California Highway Patrol recently arrested the drivers of six cars for racing on Interstate 280 in the San Francisco Bay area at more than 120 mph. Officers said the six had ticket stubs in their cars indicating they had just seen 2 Fast 2 Furious.
