Wrong-Way Driver Killed In Fiery Wreck On Muskogee Turnpike

NewsOn6.com

WAGONER COUNTY - A fiery three-car accident involving one fatality closed both southbound lanes and one northbound lane of the Muskogee Turnpike near mile marker 7 in Wagoner County Friday night.

A wrong-way driver caused the accident that happened just before 9:30 p.m., according to Lieutenant Phil Guest of the Oklahoma Highway Patrol. The wrong-way driver was killed and another person was injured in the wrecks.

"We had a small pickup truck traveling in the wrong direction at a high rate of speed, traveling northbound in the southbound lanes," Guest said at the scene of the accident.

A passenger car swerved to avoid the oncoming truck, ran off the roadway to right, "caught on fire and was engulfed in flames," the trooper reported.

The wrong-way pickup then struck a Toyota Tundra pickup head-on. The driver of the small pickup was killed, and the driver of the second truck was transported to an area hospital with an unknown degree of injury.

Guest said that the OHP had a trooper en route to the scene after someone called in to report an erratic driver, but the crash happened before the truck could be stopped. One unsubstantiated witness report was that the pickup had been driving all over the road going northbound then somehow got turned around and headed north in the southbound lane.

The people in the small passenger car were able to exit their vehicle before it caught on fire and were apparently not injured, the trooper said.

Guest said he believed the fire in the passenger car was caused when the hot converter caught dry grass on fire, but it was not confirmed.

The Highway Patrol has not yet released the names of any of the people involved in the wreck.  NewsOn6.com will have that information as soon as it is available.