Police have arrested a 30-year-old man in a Saturday hit-and-run in Armstrong, B.C., that left two young men dead.
The crash happened around 1:30 a.m. near Spallumcheen on Highway 97A, where the B.C. Highway Patrol says two pickup trucks collided head-on.
Witnesses told police that one of the trucks, a black GMC Sierra, was driving on the wrong side of the highway when it hit the other pickup, which had four people inside.
Two of them, a 19-year-old man from Vernon and a 20-year-old man from Coldstream, were killed.
Ally Gogush was walking her dog nearby when she heard the collision and ran to the scene to help. She said she arrived to find a chaotic scene.
“There was nothing, there’s no doors, it was open — the front end was crunched in and the two passengers were pinned and it had pushed the front passenger seat into the passenger that was sitting in the back, the motor was pushed into that (other) gentleman,” she said.
“The driver of the one vehicle started yelling, ‘Does anybody know how to tell if anybody’s breathing? … So I went over there and I blacked my phone out and I put it under the gentleman’s kind of nose to see if I could get breath and I felt for a pulse, and he wasn’t responding.”
According to police, the Sierra’s driver and a passenger fled the scene on foot.
As Gogush was on the phone with 911 and she and other bystanders tried to render aid to the victims, she said she saw one of the suspects slip away.
“He got up and he took about 10 steps, and then just down the embankment and started going, running away,” she said.
The suspected driver was arrested later on Saturday.
Police are still looking for witnesses and any video recorded in the area at the time.
Anyone with information is asked to contact B.C. Highway Patrol at 250-828-3184.