Anchorage police say gunfire and a call for help early Saturday morning led to a deadly crash between a police patrol car and a taxicab.
At a news conference on Saturday, Police Chief Sean Case said two people were pronounced dead at the scene —the cab driver and a front-seat passenger. He said three other riders, along with the officer, were taken to the hospital. Their injuries were not life threatening.
Case says the officer was headed west on 36th Avenue in response to a call near Arctic Boulevard and West 36th Avenue. Case said the collision occurred when the patrol car and the taxicab entered the intersection of 36th and A Street at the same time.
“The officer that was involved had his emergency lights activated,” Case said. “I don’t have information on whether the siren was activated at that time. That’s going to take a little bit more investigation to determine whether that siren was activated.”
Case says traffic fatality investigations are complicated, and a police officer’s involvement in the collision adds yet another layer of complexity.
“So, if you're familiar with some of the fatal collisions that we've had in the past, these investigations go on for several, several months,” the police chief said. “So, I just want to make sure that the expectation is that we're going to provide as much information as we can when we get it, but we're just in the very, very early stages of this investigation.”
So far, police have not identified the cab driver and the front-seat passenger who were killed in the crash. They were still working to contact next of kin.
The name of the officer involved has not been released yet. Case said it will require time for him to recover from his injuries, so he will not be returning to duty in the immediate future. Police say other officers responding to the initial report of gunfire near Arctic Blvd. and West 36th Avenue were diverted to the crash scene. No arrests were made and no injuries reported in the shots-fired call.
The police chief noted that fatal traffic collisions involving on-duty officers are rare in Anchorage. Case says the most recent case he recalls was in 2001, when Officer Justin Wollam was killed after a drunk driver struck his patrol car, head-on, during a police chase. Case says the suspect was driving the wrong way on the Glenn Highway, when the collision occurred.
