Florida: Wrong-Way Driver Nearly Struck Cop
Less than 48 hours after the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office said goodbye to one of its own following a wrong-way driving crash, a Tampa Police Officer had his own encounter with a motorist traveling in the wrong direction.
Sunday’s incident on Interstate 275 resulted in a DUI arrest instead of a fatal crash. A video recording of the encounter was released Monday morning. The footage comes from Officer S. Van Treese’s dash cam, showing the cruiser headed northbound on I-275 around 5 a.m. Sunday. As the officer, a member of the city’s DUI unit, neared Fowler Avenue, Van Treese encountered a motorist heading southbound in his northbound lane.
Van Treese was able to take evasive action to avoid a head-on collision. The motorist was spotted shortly after by Officer Gregory Murphy getting off in the wrong direction at the Busch Boulevard exit, Tampa Police wrote in an email to media.
The motorist, identified as Aja Cancela, 34, of Riverview was pulled over by Murphy. Cancela was ultimately charged with DUI after, police say, she failed to pass field sobriety tests.
Sunday’s near-collision is just the latest in a long list of wrong-way driving incidents in the Tampa Bay area. On March 12, Deputy John Kotfila Jr. was killed on the Lee Roy Selmon Expressway following a head-on crash with a wrong-way driver. A witness to the crash said Kotfila put himself in harm’s way to protect her vehicle from being struck by the man heading west on the expressway’s eastbound lanes.
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