SUV slams into cable truck, killing 3 in Tacoma

TACOMA, Wash. — A high-speed crash in a narrow alley claimed three lives in Tacoma Wednesday morning.

At 10:40 a.m., a red Chevy Trailblazer plowed into a cable utility truck, killing all three people inside the SUV and injuring the worker hoisted in the truck’s bucket.

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Moments before the SUV became a tangled mass of metal, an eyewitness told KIRO 7 she was standing close enough to hear what was going on inside the vehicle.

“The girl was yelling at the dude, the dude was yelling at the girl,” Elizabeth Banks recalled.

Banks also said she saw the Trailblazer bust through two construction barriers in the alley, cross South 14th Street, then barrel into a North Sky Communications cable utility truck at what she estimates was close to 60 miles per hour. “She sped through here so quickly, it was really ‘zoom!' And you heard a crash, and then you heard ‘oh my God,’ then somebody said ‘call 911.’”

The female driver and a male passenger in the back seat were killed instantly.  A male in the front passenger seat died at the hospital.

The impact was so strong investigators with the Tacoma Police Department estimate the cable truck was pushed 30 feet.

The man hoisted to work on the cables was wearing his safety harness, or TPD Officer Shelbie Boyed believes he, too, could easily have been killed.

“The employee up in the bucket was contained,” Boyd told KIRO 7. “He never came out of the bucket, he was fastened in.”

Because of the workplace injury, the Washington State Department of Labor and Industries responded to investigate, Boyd said.

Both cable workers were taken to the hospital where they were last reported in stable condition.

A spokesman at North Sky Communications in Kent declined to comment on the accident involving the company’s truck and workers.

The Pierce County Medical Examiner’s Office will now work to identify the three people killed.

Investigators with Tacoma police will screen for the presence of alcohol or drugs in the SUV driver’s system.

Cox Media Group