ALBANY, Oregon. The victims of one of Oregon’s deadliest traffic accidents were farmworkers riding in a pickup truck at a time farmworkers typically commute home after toiling in the harvest, the state farmworkers union and officials said. mexicans.
Authorities have yet to release the names of the seven who were killed or the four who were injured when a truck left Interstate 5 Thursday and slammed into the van while it was parked on the side of the road near Albany, in an agricultural area of the Willamette Valley. .
But the Woodburn-based union PCUN said in a statement late Friday that the 11 people in the vehicle were farm workers and that it has been in contact with some of their families to support them. He also offered his condolences to those affected by the tragedy.
“Right now, families are asking for safer roads for workers commuting after a hard day at work,” said Reyna López, executive director of the union.
The Mexican Consulate in Portland also said the victims were farmworkers in a Spanish-language statement posted on Facebook and Twitter.
“According to information provided by the Oregon State Police office, seven deaths and four injuries were reported in the… accident, all of them apparently farm workers of Mexican nationality,” the statement said.
The consul traveled to a hospital in Salem, the state capital, to offer assistance to the injured, who had been taken there for «urgent medical attention,» he said.
The consulate also said it was in close communication with law enforcement and trying to locate relatives of the deceased. He urged relatives of those killed or hospitalized to call the consulate.
The driver of the truck that collided with the van, Lincoln Clayton Smith, 52, of North Highlands, California, was arrested Friday on suspicion of manslaughter, driving under the influence, reckless driving and assault, police said. . He was being held without bond at the Marion County Jail.
It was not clear if Smith’s case had been assigned to the state public defender’s office or to a specific attorney. The office did not immediately respond to a message asking about it, and a lawyer whose name appears in court documents said she had not been formally assigned to the case and could not comment.
At Smith’s arraignment, a district attorney said he had refused a field sobriety test and was unable to concentrate or answer basic questions, the Salem Statesman’s Journal informed. The prosecutor also said that Smith admitted to taking «speed» the day before the accident and that he was in possession of methamphetamine, according to the newspaper.
The prosecutor said witnesses reported that the truck had gone on and off the highway while traveling in the northbound lanes Thursday afternoon before crashing into the van without braking first, according to the Statesman Journal.
The pickup truck was then pushed into the back of another truck parked in front of it, Oregon State Police said.
All the victims were passengers in the van. Six died at the scene and one more died after being airlifted to a hospital, according to the Oregon State Police. Information about the condition of the four injured has not been made public.
Plastic-covered bodies were seen in a nearby field after the accident, the Albany Democratic Herald informed.
The accident is one of the deadliest in Oregon in recent years.
TO frontal 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 overturned on an icy Interstate 84 highway and crashed into 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.
Other crash in 1988, also near Albany on I-5, it killed seven people and injured 37 more. Two babies were among those killed in the 23-vehicle pileup.
Albany is located between Salem and Eugene and is about 70 miles south of Portland. I-5 is the major north-south interstate highway on the West Coast.