Nine killed as elderly motorist crashes through market

A three-year-old girl was among eight people killed when an elderly driver crashed his car through a crowded marketplace in Santa Monica, California.

Forty-five others were wounded and 15 of them were said to be in a critical condition. The street, which is closed once a week for the farmers market, was turned into a makeshift morgue.

The 86-year-old motorist told officers he could not stop. “He possibly hit the accelerator instead of the brakes,” police chief James Butts said.

The driver, Russell Weller, was taken to hospital for blood tests that showed no trace of alcohol or drugs in his system.

He was not arrested, but the authorities said they were considering whether the case was “manslaughter of some type” and would be investigating whether he was qualified to drive.

“There may be some negligence as to his capacity to drive safely,” Butts said, although he added that the man had a valid driver’s licence.

Weller walked unsteadily with a cane and hugged and smiled at people who picked him up when he left the police station later.

His family later issued an apology: “Mr Weller and his family want to express their deepest sympathies to the victims and their families of the tragic accident,” family lawyer Jim Bianco said.

“This was an unintentional and unfortunate accident. Mr Weller is shaken up, but his thoughts tonight are with the victims and their families.”

Butts said he did not have an estimate of the car’s speed. Witnesses said the red 1992 Buick was moving very fast along Arizona Avenue.

“Sixty miles per hour and it wasn’t slowing down. It was flying. And then people down, dead and everything,” said David Lang, manager of a shoe shop on the road.

“It was like a hurricane just came down the centre of the street,” said Megan Sheehy, the manager of a nearby restaurant.

“I heard a car just hit, bang, bang, bang,” said another witness, Mojgan Pour. “I heard people screaming. By the time I looked, I never even saw the car. I tried to help a man and he died while I was helping him.”

David Leifer was shopping for tropical fruit when he heard someone scream, “Oh my God.” He looked round to see a street full of bleeding, critically injured people.

He stripped off his shirt and used it to prop up the head of a badly cut woman, then grabbed some oranges to support her legs.

“I had blood all over me,” he said.

Bahram Manahedgi, 50, said one person was on the bonnet of the car when it finally came to rest, and a woman was crushed beneath it.

Manahedgi said that when he went to pull the driver out, “he was an old man. His eyes were open and he was alive. I said, ‘Do you know what the hell you did?’ He said, ‘No.’ I just opened the door, I pulled him out.”

A crowd gathered around the car and “wanted to beat him up,” Manahedgi said. “I said, ‘He’s an old man, leave him alone.”’

Friends in Weller’s neighbourhood of stately, cottage-style homes said he had no history of driving problems and no apparent physical or mental impairments.

“You will never find a more alert 80s in the world,” said Mary Roney, who has lived two doors from Weller and his wife for 30 years. “There’s no better person in the world and no person that would be more devastated from this.”

The car was extensively damaged, including a smashed front end and windscreen. Shoes were on its roof.

The injured were treated on large orange sheets before they were taken to hospitals by ambulance or helicopter.

The avenue was strewn with stall tents collapsed around their twisted metal frames. Handbags and shoes littered the scene.

A baby pushchair sat in the street. Jerry Farias, who had been selling potatoes and melons at the market, said he saw a woman snatch her child out of the path of the speeding car.

The woman was hit and the child suffered a head cut, but neither appeared to have life-threatening injuries, he said.

The Wednesday market bisects Santa Monica’s popular Third Street pedestrian promenade and is near the famous Santa Monica Pier. It draws thousands of shoppers.

Doctors said a ninth victim – a 50-year-old man – later died in hospital.