A semi-truck driver who slammed into a passenger van in western Oregon and killed seven people on Thursday in one of the state’s deadliest crashes in recent years has been arrested on suspicion of being drunk behind the wheel, police said.
Investigators on Friday arrested Lincoln Clayton Smith, 52, of North Highlands, California, on counts of driving under the influence of intoxicants, reckless driving, manslaughter and assault.
Eleven people were in the van when Smith hit it on Interstate 5 north of Albany, Oregon, authorities said. Six people died at the scene, one more died after being airlifted to a hospital and four were injured, according to Oregon state police.
State police said the names of the victims would not be made public until their families have been notified. Authorities have not released information about the condition of the four injured passengers.
Smith was arraigned on Friday afternoon and was being detained without bail in a local jail.
At the arraignment, a prosecutor said Smith refused a field sobriety test and was unable to focus and answer basic questions, the Salem Statesman Journal reported. The prosecutor also said Smith acknowledged taking “speed” the day before the crash and was in possession of methamphetamine, according to the paper.
The husband of one of the dead passengers said their one-year-old son had asked for his mother on Friday.
“My future is destroyed,” he was quoted as saying, through an interpreter, by the Statesman Journal, which published a photo of victims’ relatives and friends after Smith’s arraignment outside the courthouse where the hearing was held.
Two semi-trucks and the van were involved in the deadly Thursday afternoon crash on I-5 in an agricultural area in the Willamette Valley.
The truck which authorities say Smith was driving left the northbound lanes of I-5 and hit the van as it was parked on the roadside, according to police. The van was then pushed into the back of another truck parked in front of it.
Witnesses said the first truck had been weaving on and off the road and hit the van without braking first, according to a prosecutor’s comments, as reported by the Statesman Journal.
The northbound lanes of I-5 were closed for hours as experts investigated. But the roadway – which is the west coast’s main north-south interstate highway – was reopened on Thursday night, state transportation officials said.
Bodies were seen covered in plastic in a nearby field after the crash, the Albany Democrat-Herald reported. Police and fire officials put a blue tarp on the wrecked van and placed a barrier near one of the trucks to block the view of the scene, according to the news outlet.
Life Flight Network confirmed that one of its emergency medical helicopters transported one patient from the crash to a Salem-area hospital.
A witness, Adrian Gonzalez, told the Statesman Journal the van was mangled by the force of the impact.
“Judging by the damage, it looked like the van was sandwiched,” he said. “It got hit very hard.”
The crash was among the deadliest in Oregon in recent memory.
A head-on collision on a remote road in Harney county in eastern Oregon in August 2018 killed a family of seven, including five young children. Eight people died in total.
In December 2012, nine people died after a tour bus careened on an icy Interstate 84 and crashed through a guardrail, plunging several hundred feet down a steep embankment. The bus was carrying about 40 people when the accident occurred in an area near Pendleton called Deadman Pass.
Another crash in 1988, also near Albany on I-5, killed seven people and injured 37 more. Two infants were among those killed in the fiery 23-vehicle pileup.
Albany is about 70 miles (113km) south of Portland, and it is between Salem and Eugene.
The Associated Press contributed reporting.