Ah, 3:30 a.m. in the Hub City. A time for peace, quiet, and apparently, treating University Avenue like the final lap of the Daytona 500. Early Thursday morning, 35-year-old Joseph Vasquez decided that the red light at 50th and University was merely a polite suggestion, blasting north at a high rate of speed. In a twist of peak Lubbock luck, he did this right in front of an unmarked Texas Department of Public Safety unit, forcing the trooper to slam on the brakes just to avoid getting T-boned.
Give credit to the DPS troopers here—they didn’t even have time to turn on their lights or initiate a chase before the laws of physics took over. Vasquez managed to cause absolute chaos entirely on his own. Speeding north, his car struck the south curb at 44th Street, launched across the intersection to smack the north curb, and then careened wildly through the property of the Courtyards apartment complex before embedding itself into the southwest corner of a building.
The complex’s signage proudly boasts that the property is “Newly Remodeled,” which is excellent timing because they are definitely going to need to call the contractors back out for a follow-up. Miraculously, none of the residents inside the building were injured or woken up by a sedan entering their living room. Troopers rushed over to pull Vasquez from the wreckage and perform life-saving measures, but he was later pronounced dead at UMC.
Honestly, between the street racing, the curb-hopping, and the literal building-bashing, is it even a real Thursday morning in Lubbock if someone doesn’t try to drive their car directly through a structural wall?
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