Highway patrol investigating crash involving New Phila Police cruiser
NEW PHILADELPHIA (WJER) (Aug. 29, 2022) – The city police department is temporarily down a cruiser.
Chief Mike Goodwin says one experienced front-end damage and had its airbags deploy in a crash near the station (at the intersection of Second Street SE and East High Avenue) around 11:10 this morning.
“One of our officers was responding to a call to assist the fire department. They had pulled out of the station and was going through the intersection of Second and East High. The cruiser had its lights and sirens activated. There was a crash involving a westbound vehicle on East High.”
The state highway patrol was called in to investigate and will determine whether the officer or the other driver was to blame for the accident.
“When we are running lights and sirens, if we are going through an intersection and the light is still red, we have to proceed with caution,” Goodwin says. “I’m not sure if that’s what happened here, if it truly was a red light. If it was a green light, that’s going to be on the other person, but we just have to kind of wait and see for right now.”
The officer involved was Kaitlin Brown, who experienced what Goodwin described as a friction burn to her forearm from the driver’s side airbag deploying. She went to the health department afterward to take a drug test per department protocol. Goodwin says the occupants of the other vehicle were taken to the hospital by ambulance to get checked out as a precaution.