Police have released videos from the arrest of a 20-year-old road rage suspect who was seriously injured when the parked patrol vehicle she was detained in was struck by a freight train in northern Colorado.
According to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, multiple law enforcement agencies responded to a report of a road rage incident involving a firearm in Fort Lupton on September 16. A Platteville police officer stopped Yareni Rios-Gonzalez’s car just past a set of railroad tracks and parked the patrol vehicle on the crossing.
She was placed in the back of the police vehicle, which was hit by the train as officers were searching her car.
The newly released footage, which includes video from the dashboard of the police cruiser and officers’ body cameras, shows cops pulling over Rios-Gonzalez’s truck and later handcuffing her before she is put in the patrol car, which was parked on the train tracks.
As the officers then searched the truck for weapons and deliberated whether Rios-Gonzalez threw anything out the window before pulling over, a loud train horn can be heard in the background as the locomotive nears the patrol car.
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“Oh my God, oh my God,” a female officer is heard saying.
The video then shows footage from the body cam of another officer, who yells “stay back,” before cutting to a dashboard camera that shows the moment the train smashed into the patrol car.
“The suspect was in the vehicle that was hit by the train,” the female officer then says before running over to the badly damaged cruiser.
The video then ends with a policeman and sheriffs continuing to search Rios-Gonzalez’s vehicle as an ambulance is parked nearby.
Her lawyer said she suffered numerous injuries, among them nine broken ribs, a broken arm and broken teeth.
“When she was in the back of the car, she was able to see the train coming,” Paul Wilkinson told CNN. “She was frantically trying to escape, trying to open the doors, but she was handcuffed.”
“She saw it coming and prepared for the worst,” he said, adding that his client then lost consciousness before later waking up in the hospital.
“She’s obviously very upset.”
The Fort Lupton Police Department is investigating the road rage report, while the Colorado State Patrol is investigating the crash. The Colorado Bureau of Investigation is looking into the woman’s injury while she was in police custody.
