Two people are dead after a dramatic Tesla crash on Monday morning in White Plains, just north of New York City. The electric vehicle hopped a curb, hit a tree and slammed into an apartment building. Firefighters pulled the flaming wreck away from the structure, but then the EV exploded, injuring a bystander with flying shrapnel. It’s unclear how the crash happened, but eyewitnesses described something eerily similar to an unintended acceleration event.
Millie Ortiz Sheehan, the 70-year-old wife of a councilman in nearby Greenburgh, was driving the Tesla with her 36-year-old daughter-in-law, Diana Trochez Sheehan, in the passenger seat. The pair had just dropped off two of Millie’s grandchildren at a daycare center, according to the Journal News. While the crash killed both women, no one was inside the apartment unit that the Tesla crashed into. One of the residents returned home to the incident, the newspaper explained:
Zaneta Williams, 46, who lives in the apartment that got hit by the car and caught fire, said she was lucky not to have been home when the incident occurred. She could have been working in her home office.“I left about 15 to 20 minutes before it happened to go to work,” Williams said. “My son’s room is the room that was fully blown out, but he’s back in college so thank God he’s not here and no one was in the house.”
“But I’m happy that no one was in the apartment,” Williams said. “I gotta break the news to my son tonight.”
Both the car and the building were on fire when first responders arrived. Investigators believe the two women were trapped inside the Tesla with no way to escape, according to WABC. Two children are among the people evacuated from the apartment who were treated for minor injuries at the scene. The bystander who was struck by debris from the explosion was transported to a hospital.
Investigators will likely determine whether unintentional acceleration contributed to this crash. Tesla denied that its vehicles were impacted by the alleged issues in 2020 when federal regulators reviewed a petition to open an investigation. However, a Cybertruck was involved in a similar incident when it unexpectedly rocketed into a home earlier this year.