An SUV driven by an elderly man plowed into a street party at the Northside Grange Hall in Milwaukee, killing four people and injuring several more Thursday night.
Authorities identified the driver as Frank Madison, who had been refused entry to the annual John Marshall Day Parade hours earlier, and was taking a group of friends to the event. After being turned away, the SUV followed a crowd of people, slamming into the people who had been walking alongside him, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
John Mullins, 37, who witnessed the crash, told NBC News that the driver almost severed a person’s leg. According to a witness, the SUV hit a group of people with a force that caused three victims to stand on one another before the vehicle struck them all again. “It just started flying,” Mullins said. “They were catapulted around.”
Eyewitnesses said that there was no reason for the car to have approached the crowd so fast. “A lot of people [were] walking toward the car, but the people in the car didn’t pay any attention to the people around them,” one witness told The Journal Sentinel. “Just kept going, just careened off the road and hit a few people.”
The funeral for one of the victims, 61-year-old Paul G. Backus, was held on Friday, and his death has been declared a homicide. Law enforcement officials are looking into whether the crash was intentional.
Read the full story at NBC News.
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