A pickup truck driver who plowed through racing bicyclists in Arizona on Saturday left a bloody trail of carnage in his wake, according to a harrowing eyewitness account.
Bicyclists were flipped aside and over the truck’s hood as the 35-year-old driver – who was later shot by cops – hit the gas through a throng of racers in Show Low, witness Tony Quinones told the Associated Press.
“He went right at us,” Quinones, a 55-year-old participant in the race, said.
Seven bicyclists and the driver remained in the hospital on Sunday, the Show Low Police Department said on its Facebook page.
Six of the cyclists were in critical condition and the driver was in stable condition, according to the department.
Quinones told the AP that he spoke with a fellow bicyclist before the race who ended up as one of the many left on the ground battered, moaning and bleeding.
“I can’t believe I just shook this guy’s hand and we wished each other luck, and now I’m watching him with blood all over the place,” Quinones told the AP. “And not a little blood. It wasn’t trickling out. There’s like a pool of blood.”
“He’s got a compound fracture, and I’m just saying, ‘Hey man keep breathing, keep breathing,’” he told the AP. “It’s not just one. There’s like six, seven, eight other guys like who are all around doing the same thing.”
The cyclists were just getting started in the 55-and-over groups of the annual Bike the Bluff Arizona State Championship Road Race when the driver of the Black Super Duty Ford rammed them, the police department said on Facebook.
The driver hit a telephone pole before he maneuvered out and came back towards some bicyclists who had converged on his car after his seeming attack, the AP reported. Cops caught up with him and shot the unnamed suspect, a local resident, the police department said.
The circumstances of the shooting weren’t clear.
Six of the injured racers had been taken to the hospital by ambulance and two or three walk-in victims were also treated, the department said.
With Post wires.