The driver of a flatbed tow truck made life miserable for some Sherman Oaks residents recently after the hauler launched a pickup into a second parked truck, then knocked down a utility pole and cut off power to the neighborhood.
The incident, which the Los Angeles Police Department is investigating as an attempted auto theft and hit and run, was captured on a Nest camera around 8:30 a.m. Sunday.
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The dramatic video shows the tow truck screeching around a corner as a pickup truck hangs precariously from its deck. The driver of the tow truck appears to lose control as the dangling pickup slams into another parked truck and pushes it down the street before it smashes into a utility pole. That impact knocks the towed truck to the ground as the flatbed driver speeds away.
The commotion awakened residents in the 13000 block of Cumpston Street.
“I knew it was a crash, but I didn’t know what exactly was going on,” said one resident who spoke with The Times, but declined to give their name.
The resident told The Times that before the crash, someone had watched the tow truck driver stop and ring the doorbell of a home where a dark colored pickup was parked. When nobody answered, the tow truck operator began loading the truck onto the flat bed. They were interrupted though when someone in the home woke up and confronted him, according to the resident who spoke with The Times.
The tow truck driver jumped into the vehicle and sped off, but without securing the load, according to the resident.
The suspect appears to have lost control as he drove away, according to the LAPD, and detectives gathered multiple reports from the incident, for a a hit-and-run and vehicle theft. The Department of Water and Power repaired the utility pole on Sunday and residents lost electricity for a few hours.
“This is a quiet neighborhood and there are children who live here. It’s so lucky that nobody was out when all of this happened,” the resident said.
