A case of reckless and negligent driving has been opened after a crash involving five cars parked outside Dixies Restaurant on Tuesday October 6.
Cape Medical Response (CMR) spokesman Darren Zimmerman said that on arrival at 9pm they had found the occupants of a VW Polo had all been thrown from their car.
He said the occupants were treated at the scene and two were transported to local hospitals by CMR ambulances while a third was transported by the military health services ambulance.
Lakeside resident Glendyr Du Preez and her husband, Kevin, were celebrating their 30th wedding anniversary at Dixies at the time of the crash.
She said they had parked their Opel Zafira “quite a bit up the road” on the sea-side of the road facing Simon’s Town as it was the only parking available.
While having dessert, they heard a loud bang and then another one.
“We looked out the window and saw a car had come to a standstill against another car. We then went outside and saw this horrendous mess and a man shouting that his bakkie had been hit,” she said.
The driver of the VW Polo, she said, had been partially ejected from the car and the other two occupants had been flung into the road.
“The driver’s leg was in the car and the rest of his body was hanging out while one of the occupants landed in the middle of the road and the other next to the bus stop on the opposite side of the road,” she said.
It was only then that her husband exclaimed: “look at our car.”
She said their car had been smashed against the brick wall separating the pavement from the railway line. It was facing the opposite direction in which it had been parked and its back wheel was hanging over the ledge.
She said the impact of the crash resulted in the VW Polo’s engine being flung out of the car and hitting a double-cab bakkie which had been parked a few spaces behind them.
“The car had also hit another two cars before coming to a standstill right in front of the entrance to Dixies,’’ she said.
Ms Du Preez said their car was a write-off.
She said it was one of the worst accidents she had seen and she wonders what might have happened had they not stayed for dessert.
“Our lives were saved by a waffle,” she said.
Simon’s Town police branch commander Warrant Officer Jerome Engelbrech confirmed that a case of reckless and negligent driving had been opened.
He could not say if the driver of the VW Polo had been under the influence of alcohol at the time of the crash.
Commanding officer at the Institute for Maritime Medicine, Colonel Chris Arnold, confirmed that military members had been involved in a car crash but he said he had no information on their injuries.
