A bizarre scene that involved a car accident, an SUV atop a Cadillac and gunfire reportedly brought traffic to a standstill along the Southwest Freeway in front of Memorial Hermann Southwest hospital yesterday morning — but thanks to TV news, it's hard to know exactly what happened.
According to KPRC, it started around 11 a.m. yesterday when two vehicles — a Ford Expedition and a Ford F-150 pickup — were chasing each other along the freeway near Beechnut. A witness told Channel 2 that the F-150 drove into the hospital's parking lot and the Expedition tried to follow. The SUV "could not make the turn, ran over the bushes and crashed into several vehicles on the other side of the parking lot," the witness said. Then, gunfire broke out: "I heard one shot and then a succession of eight to 10 shots. It appeared that one individual was standing out in the feeder road firing at what appeared to be a red pickup truck," the witness told KPRC. The red truck drove off and three men involved in the crash ran away, police said.
That differs a bit from KTRK's account, which had the people in the SUV and the people in the pickup getting into an altercation while driving along the freeway. Channel 13 reports that someone in the SUV pulled a gun and began shooting at someone else: "They were firing at another vehicle," HPD officer D.E. Myers said. "We're not sure why." Then, for some reason, the SUV pulled off the freeway, jumped a median, hit a white truck, flipped over and landed on top of what KTRK identified as a Crown Victoria but looked a lot to us like a Cadillac. One consistency between the two reports: The three suspects involved in the shooting took off on foot and are still at large.
KTRK reports that police detained five men in the truck involved in the chase, who were said to have been in the country illegally. Police apparently still don't know whether the shooting was random.
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