Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

SUV leaves trail of damage

By JACOB H. FRIES
Published March 31, 2007

ADVERTISEMENT [Times photo: Ted McLaren] This Dodge Durango had quite an eventful Friday afternoon, culminating with the SUV ending up on the edge of the pool at 2166 Campus Drive in Clearwater.

CLEARWATER - A local man driving his SUV on Druid Road on Friday afternoon veered off the street, drove through three fences, clipped a house, destroyed a backyard gazebo and crashed into a pool, authorities said.

Richard King, 52, was then taken to Morton Plant Hospital where he was recovering, police said. A hospital spokeswoman would not specify King's condition, saying she had no information on him.

Police investigators had not determined what caused King to leave the roadway and would not say whether he had any health conditions that might explain the crash. As of late Friday afternoon, police had not interviewed him.

King was headed west in a Dodge Durango about 1:30 p.m. when he crossed Belcher Road, veered south across the opposite lane, jumped a curb and crashed through a wood fence, said Clearwater police Sgt. John Diebel. He smashed a gazebo, clipped a house, drove through another wood fence and then a chain-link one.

The sport utility vehicle leveled a clothesline and finally smashed into a pool, the passenger-side wheels dangling in the water. Emergency workers pulled King from the vehicle and took him to the hospital. Damage estimates were not immediately available.

Louise Falkowski, sitting in her front yard, heard "a gigantic noise." She thought it had come from a neighbor's house and went to investigate.

But then looking through a fence into her own back yard, she saw the SUV teetering on the edge of her pool. The windshield shattered. Pieces of chain-link fence wrapped around the vehicle. The man inside covered in blood.

She had been in the back yard just 15 minutes earlier.

"I'm just thankful no one else was hurt," she said later, taking a closer look at the mangled vehicle hanging in her pool.

[Last modified March 31, 2007, 00:41:33]