Labor Day driving not quite in the holiday spirit

Please click on image to move to Flickr site and ENLARGE view of "accident" scene on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in Fayetteville, Arkansas, on September 7, 2009.

According to witnesses in a vehicle (black one on the curb near center of photo) a car passed them about 60 yards west (to the right) on MLK at high speed and pulled in front of them, crossing the right lane and jumping the curb, crossing the sidewalk, bursting through a fence and seeming to accelerate across the lot at right before crashing into the tree line. The driver had disappeared by the time the police, firefighters and ambulance attendants reached the scene.
The car ended up near where the Town Branch of the West Fork of the White River, flowing southeast from the athletic facility area of the UA campus flows under the railroad through more-than-century-old rock-lined tunnel. Police did not immediately capture the driver even though a vehicle with a sign saying "police dog" was on the scene. The good news was that no one was hurt, unless it was the speeding driver. A special benefit of this relatively harmless accident was that all the cars traveling north from Hill Place and entering MLK Jr. Boulevard from Royal Oak Drive (the northern exit from Hill Place student apartments while the many emergency vehicles were on the street to the west obeyed the right-turn-only sign and went east on MLK. The majority on other recent days turned left despite the sign and the design of the median that makes a left-turn difficult to execute.