Pedestrian killed, others injured, including police, when car loses control, crashes in Hillside Walgreens parking lot
A pedestrian was killed and multiple people, including police officers, were injured when a car lost control and crashed into a Walgreens parking lot in Hillside Wednesday afternoon, village officials said.
The car crashed into the lot in the 4700 block of Butterfield Road around 12:30 p.m. and struck both parked cars and people. Multiple ambulances were called to the scene, village officials said.
Hillside police said the 73-year-old man lost control Hyundai Genesis SUV due to a possible medical emergency. They said he may have been traveling at a high rate of speed.
Cynthia Cameron and Denise Roy heard it all go down outside their hair salon nearby.
"All of a sudden we heard this loud impact and this guy spinned around this car just lost control and kept hitting cars, I don't know if he was avoiding it but it just kept going on and on and ended up in some kind of embankment," Cameron said.
"Super scary, I heard it before I saw it," Roy said.
The officials said the driver initially struck a police squad car that was sitting at a red light at LaVergne and Butterfield, continued on Butterfield, and then struck other cars until on Butterfield until eventually ending up in the Walgreens parking lot. At last check, the driver was in critical condition.
Two officers who were in the squad cars struck by the car were seriously injured and taken to Loyola Medical Center for treatment. While village officials were not sure of how many people, exactly, were injured, they said several were also taken to Loyola Medical Center in serious conditions, while several others were taken to Elmhurst Hospital with less serious injuries.
The pedestrian who was killed was a 78-year-old man with a walker who was on the sidewalk on a pedestrian ramp at the corner of the parking lot. Officials said he was going down the ramp, and when the car careened into the lot, it struck him.
Hillside police said nine ambulances were called to the scene to take multiple people to the hospital.
Chief Dan Murphy commends the officers hurt in the crash for trying to save the 78-year-old's life.
"When I arrived on scene, the two officers that were just involved in the accident, one of them was performing CPR on our pedestrian ... trying to do life saving measure of him before we could get the fire department. And the other officer was trying to control traffic and everything else on the scene," he said.
The intersection of Butterfield and Wolf roads will be closed for the rest of the day for the investigation, village officials said.
Village officials and police said preliminary information indicated that the driver was also not intoxicated, but is undergoing further evaluation and tests to confirm.