SELMER, Tenn. – One day after a drag-racing car flew into a crowd and killed six people, witnesses questioned why the driver was allowed to speed down a multilane highway with no guard rails, lined on both sides by hundreds of spectators.
“It ain’t really safe to do anything with drag cars on a city street,” said 19-year-old Garett Moore, who said he was about 15 feet away from the wreck, but was uninjured. “They shouldn’t have done it.”
Tennessee Highway Patrol spokesman Mike Browning said Sunday the six killed were in their teens or early 20s. The accident injured at least 18 others, including a 5-year-old boy, who were taken to hospitals in Tennessee and Mississippi.
The crash happened Saturday during an “exhibition burnout” – when a drag racer spins his tires to make them heat up and smoke – at the Cars for Kids charity event in Selmer, located about 80 miles east of Memphis.
Amateur video of the crash, broadcast on WMC-TV in Memphis, showed the car’s engine revving loudly before the vehicle sped down a highway. After a few hundred feet, the smoking car skidded off the road in front of a drive-in restaurant.
Authorities identified the driver as pro drag racer Troy Warren Critchley, an Australian who is now based in Wylie, Texas. He suffered minor injuries and was taken by car to a nearby hospital for treatment, authorities said.
There were no criminal charges against Critchley, Browning said.
There was a guard rail along at least part of the highway, but not along the stretch where the crash occurred.
Nick Staples, who was at the car show and charity event with his wife and three children from Columbus, Miss., said he was standing 20 feet from where the car plowed into the audience.
“There should have been guard rails,” Staples said. “But even if there had been, it wouldn’t have mattered.”
Larry Price, the founder of Cars for Kids, said he has been staging this event for 18 years in Selmer, and they always do burnouts at the end of the parade. There had been no accidents in the past, he said.
“We’re not racing,” Price said. “We’re just doing little-old burnouts, revving the motors up, stuff like that.”
There were four professional drag-racers at the show, and each was supposed to do one burnout, Price said. Most people burn the tires for less than 50 feet, but Critchley went much farther than that before losing control, Price said.
Authorities closed the festival after the crash.
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