A combination of driving under the influence of drugs and speed led to a fiery cybertruck accident which killed three students and injured a fourth in Piedmont last year, according to California Highway Patrol.
Shortly after 3 am on November 27, a accelerating Tesla Cybertruck along Hampton Road east of Sea View Avenue left the road, jumped a sidewalk and bounced on a tree. The impact made the truck turned to the left, where it broke a retaining wall and caught fire, according to the CHP report.
Three people – Soren Dixon, 19, Jack Nelson, 20, and Krysta Tsukahara, 19 – suffered major burns and blunt trauma and were declared dead on the scene. Their deaths were caused by asphyxiation due to the inhalation of the smoke of the car, burns being a “significant” factor in death, according to a autopsy report quoted by the San Francisco Chronicle.
The Chronicle reported that Dixon, which was driving the Cybertruck, had a blood alcohol content of 0.195%, more than double the legal limit for the legal age of alcohol consumption. The toxicology reports cited by the chronicle said that cocaine had been detected in the blood of Dixon, Nelson and Tsukahara.
The CHP report does not specify whether the autonomous vehicle features were used at the time of the accident.
A fourth person, Jordan Miller, was removed from the vehicle after the accident by a witness. Miller, 20, has undergone major burns and internal injuries, but survived the CHP report.
Students were graduates in 2023 from Piedmont High School who were at the home visit to the University for Thanksgiving. Dixon was a second major in organic sciences at the USC. Nelson was a second year student at the Colorado University, Boulder and Tsukahara was a second year student at Savannah College of Art and Design, according to their families.
It is not clear which caused the fire of Cybertruck. The CHP multidisciplinary accident investigation team will conduct their own accident investigation in the coming months. The investigation will probably be completed in about four to six months, said the CHP spokesman. Andrew Barclay.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which previously investigated deadly accidents involving partially automated vehicles in Tesla, did not operate the accident, a spokesman for the Times said on Monday.
In the hours preceding the crash, Dixon, Nelson, Tsukahara and Miller had been “gathered” with other friends, according to the CHP report. During the event, Dixon “consumed about eight alcoholic drinks ranging from beer and vodka,” said the report.
After leaving the rally, the group went to Dixon to be able to take the Cybertruck. They were on the way to Miller’s house when the accident occurred. Another friend who was driving separately, a few minutes behind the Cybertruck group, saw the vehicle crushed and used a tree branch to break the vehicle’s right passenger window to save Miller.
The person tried to break the other windows to help the rest of the occupants, but the fire quickly spread in the rest of the vehicle, according to the CHP report.
Piedmont police chief Jeremy Bowers said at the time of the accident that the distributors had obtained an iPhone alert from a passenger in the Cybertruck around 3:10 a.m., Tesla was swallowed up by the flames when the police arrived on the scene, according to Bowers.
California Daily Newspapers
