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Two damaged bikes lay on the street as police officers from the New Orleans Police Department react to a fatal accident on Esplanade Avenue in Bayou St. John, New Orleans, on Saturday, March 2, 2019 The authorities claim that several people were killed and others injured after being hit by a vehicle on a busy New Orleans artery. (Shawn Fink / the lawyer via AP)
NEW ORLEANS – Police suspect a driver of being injured when he killed two people and wounded seven others, most of them on a bicycle on a bustling New Orleans thoroughfare, as large crowds gathered in the city. city for Mardi Gras.
Police spokesman Andy Cunningham said in a statement Sunday morning that the authorities were waiting for the results of an alcohol test, but believe the suspect had been reached during the first half of the year. fatal accident, Saturday night.
He identified the suspect who had been arrested at the scene, 32-year-old Tashonty Toney, and claimed that he was the son of a New Orleans police officer.
Cunningham asserts that discovery will not alter the department's investigation, which he says will be "open and transparent."
Saturday, it was Toney's birthday, according to the press release.
Toney faces two counts of homicide and seven counts of negligent injury, hit and run and reckless operation, the statement said.
The accident occurred along a stretch of several blocks from Esplanade Avenue, a leafy street that connects the city's largest park to the French Quarter. The scene was close to the Endymion Parade, one of the biggest Mardi Gras parades in New Orleans, held on Saturday.
New Orleans police chief, Shaun Ferguson, said Saturday at a press conference that, despite the proximity of the crash with the parade route, "we do not believe in the # Moment that it has something to do with the Endymion parade ".
Police said most of the victims were cyclists and pictures of the scene showed mutilated bikes along the street.
Police Commissioner Shaun Ferguson told local media that it was passers-by in the area who arrested the driver.
"We were able to apprehend the subject so quickly because the citizens arrested this individual because they thought they were helping a person who had just been a victim of a car accident," he said. said Ferguson.
A witness, cyclist Frank Rourk, told the New Orleans lawyer he saw a driver of a dark sports car turn above the median. The driver ran into a nearby corner and lay on the sidewalk where he lost consciousness.
Rourk and two other people managed to wake up the driver. Rourk, who at first did not realize that anyone had been touched, told the driver, "I'm pretty sure you're the guy who destroyed the car, you'd better go back." then asked if he had killed anyone.
SME spokesman Jonathan Fourcade said that a man and a woman, aged about 30, had been killed.
SME director Emily Nichols told WVUE-TV that three of the five people brought to the hospital were in critical condition.
A spectator, Dane Barrymore, told the New Orleans lawyer that he was smoking a cigarette in front of a market when he saw a dark sports car running down the street. The driver made a gap in the bike path to try to bypass a vehicle.
"It just happened that there are people out there – cyclists," Barrymore said. Barrymore said he saw two women and a man being hit. He said that he had gone to help but it soon became clear that one of the women and the man had not survived.
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