NEW ORLEANS — The dust was still settling Monday outside of Café Negril on Frenchmen Street, where Friday night a car crashed into the parklet outside.
“It was pretty crazy,” Jim Croswell who was nearby said. “I don’t know what was going on but the guy seemed pretty angry,”
Croswell witnessed what the surveillance video captured.
“It was a car that was seemingly just going through normal traffic and then suddenly decided it wanted to take off,” Croswell said.
Cellphone video shows after the car hit a parked van, it reversed and backed into a moving truck. The car then speeds down Frenchmen, almost hitting someone on rollerblades. It then crashes as people scream.
“Look at all those people. That thing stays packed right there,” an unidentified person on the cellphone video, which showed the car smashed into the parklet, said. “I don’t know how there wasn’t people sitting there. Nobody got hurt in the situation.”
It’s a situation Brad Clement, who manages The Spotted Cat Music Club, said shouldn’t have happened, but worries it could happen again.
“Weekend nights we have thousands of people down here every single night,” Clement said.
His music club is near the scene. He says the mix of vehicle and foot traffic creates safety problems that need to be addressed by the city.
“We’ve been at that point for a long time. There’s probably not too many streets with as much walking traffic as here,” Clement said.
Clement points to a busy Halloween night when vehicle traffic was shut down along two blocks.
He says that worked and hopes this close call can be a wake-up call. So does Croswell, who has been in town visiting and was on Frenchmen for the first time Friday night.
“I’ve been in cities before where there are very popular streets. They just shut it down and keep it to foot traffic and things tend to go a lot smoother at that point,” Croswell said.
Eyewitness News reached out to Councilman Freddie King whose district includes Frenchmen St., to see if the city could do anything from a safety standpoint. As of Monday afternoon, King did not respond.
New Orleans police arrested the unidentified driver, charging them with reckless operation of a vehicle, no insurance, no registration, and hit and run.