Two Grand Prairie police officers are lucky they weren’t seriously injured in two separate serious crashes in two days.
Video captured by a nearby traffic camera and a police dash camera shows the moment an officer driving a SUV was hit by a tractor-trailer while passing through the intersection of Texas Highway 161 and Pioneer Parkway in Grand Prairie last Friday.[[309143961,C]]
Police said the truck driver ran a red light and then crashed into the back of the SUV.
“A fully loaded 18-wheeler ran the red light going westbound and plowed right into the left side of his Tahoe, spun it almost a complete 360 degrees,” said Sgt. Eric Hansen with the Grand Prairie Police Department Traffic Unit. “Fortunately, he wasn’t hurt, but the vehicle may be totaled.”
“Red light crashes are something we deal with on a daily basis here and are more likely to cause death or serious bodily injury than a lot of other crashes,” Hansen said. “So, we take that enforcement seriously, whether it’s through our photo-enforcement program or officers actually writing citations for that.”
Hansen said the driver told officers at the scene he didn’t know what color his light was at the time.
“Everybody that saw the video thought to themselves, 'Wow, this officer must have been hurt or even worse', and we were very fortunate in each of these cases we didn’t have an officer more seriously injured or killed in these crashes,” Hansen said.
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Just a day before, Thursday, another officer was involved in a serious crash along Interstate 30.
“He stopped a guy doing 90 mph, 30 over the speed limit, and was giving him ticket when another vehicle came off of the main lanes and drove onto the shoulder, which is pretty wide at that point,” Hansen said. “[He] crashed into the back of the police car and pushed it into the violators car that was stopped, and the police car actually struck the officer while he was standing next to the violator's car and knocked him down onto the freeway.”
The officer suffered only minor injuries.
Hansen said officers undergo training behind the wheel, but in instances like these, there is nothing they can do.
“In these situations there is very little, if anything, they can do for the officers to prevent them from happening,” Hansen said.
