As some viewers of The Voice of Freeport’s Live Facebook feed indicated, 2020 just won’t stop. In an unfortunate incident on Thursday night an area driver mistook the gas pedal for the brake pedal and drove right into the Yellow Creek. The Freeport Fire Department was called to the scene around 5:20PM last evening. The call came in while the City of Freeport was hosting “Staff on the Street” at the Park Boulevard Fire Station.
Our citizen journalist Nick NUNEZ was in attendance and left the event to check it out. Upon arrival he could barely see the top of what was then thought to be a car just below the surface of the water. It turned out to be a Jeep Cherokee. The Voice of Freeport stayed on the scene as The Freeport Police Department, The Freeport Fire Department, The Davis Fire District Dive Team, and Alber Towing collaborated to pull the vehicle out of the creek.
All told it took about two hours to pull the vehicle out of the creek. Though initial reports from the Freeport Scanner Facebook page indicated the vehicle might have just rolled into the creek it was a bit more complicated than that. According to two anonymous people on the scene they were in the vehicle at the time and the driver mistakenly hit the gas instead of the brake. The driver drove into the creek and both the driver and the passenger escaped the vehicle and the creek and waded back to the shore. It was reported by Nick Nunez who also reported that the Freeport Police Department may have issued a citation before they left.
We didn’t press to get the names of the people involved in the incident but anyone interested is able to submit a FOIA(Freedom of Information Act) request to the police department for the information.
Full coverage live at the scene can be viewed in the video below as well as some screenshots from the scene.
Carl Utt is a newly minted citizen journalist and one of the founders of The Voice of Freeport and Progressive Vision Media LLC
