Police search for driver following latest in series of Massachusetts wrong-way crashes
Massachusetts State Police are looking for a wrong-way driver who caused two crashes along Interstate 290 West in Northboro Tuesday night.
Police say around 10:20 p.m., multiple 911 callers reported the wrong-way driver. A short time later, two drivers swerved to avoid the wrong-way driver and slammed into the guardrail.
One driver was injured but is expected to be OK. The wrong-way driver could not be found by police when they responded to the scene.
Both cars were towed to a West Boylston tow yard, where they sat mangled Wednesday and labeled as "7/14/26 MSP Accident."
"I almost just died"
A group of teenagers told WBZ-TV they narrowly escaped a crash with the driver on I-290 Tuesday night.
"We were just really enjoying the moment and then I see down the road like probably 30 to 40 yards, and we see this car coming out of the on-ramp and like five cars spun out," JJ Montique said.
Montique said his friend, who was driving, was in shock, and it felt like their car just moved out of harm's way.
"It really left us in that moment I thought like, God's really with us," he said.
"It was like, wow. I almost just died," added his friend Madsen Louissant.
Louissant's mother, Echo Louissant Collins, told WBZ the situation was horrifying – especially when her son came home and told her what happened.
"For me as a mom it was really hard to hold back my emotion. I was very flustered. I was very overwhelmed," Louissant Collins said. "My child almost didn't come home tonight."
Northboro wrong-way crashes
A wrong-way driver was killed on the same stretch of I-290 in a fiery crash just three weeks ago.
Boylston resident Karen Patalano told WBZ that she personally has witnessed two different cars attempt to enter the ramp at Exit 27 on I-290 in the wrong direction – most recently, on Monday.
"I just blared on the horn and they finally stopped and backed up," Patalano said, wondering, "Is there a bug in the GPS that is sending people up that ramp?" Patalano called the incident "terrifying."
Similarly, Louissant Collina called the string of recent wrong-way crashes an "epidemic."
"What is it about this area?" she said. "What is it about this ramp? What is in particular? What is happening that is causing this because all of our lives are at stake? Our children, our moms, our babies."
On Wednesday, the Essex County District Attorney released the report on the wrong-way driver in the Route 1 crash that killed Massachusetts State Police Trooper Kevin Trainor in May. According to the report, Hernan Marrero had been served 10 alcoholic drinks, nine of them at a Saugus restaurant, in the hours before the deadly collision.
