news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/hastings-crash-witness-113514329.html
killed journalist Michael Hastings says the vehicle the 33-year-old was driving shook his car "like a freight truck" as it flew by early Tuesday morning in Los Angeles. "Was stopped at a red light tonight when a pearl white Mercedes flew past," Michael Carter wrote on Facebook a few hours later. Saw it burst into flames a quarter mile down the road when it hit a tree."
I looked down to turn my radio down, and this car just blasted past me through the red light--it shook my car. By the time the light changed, I could only see the tail lights of the white Mercedes--it was probably past Willoughby by then which was the next red light that I got stopped at.
I looked down Highland and saw a giant fireball at the base of one of the palms that line the medians on Highland. Even from as far away as I was, I could see how violent an impact it had been. I live in the area so parked near my place and sprinted over the the scene of the accident. As I was running, a couple of workers from the service station at the corner of Melrose and Highland were also running over. In broken English, one of them and I traded stories of what we saw as we ran.
A Hancock Park resident was already spraying the car with his water hose when we got to it, but wasn't making any progress. Fire trucks and police cars were at the scene almost immediately, it seemed. I stayed and watched firefighters extinguish the the blaze. Bummed a cigarette from a guy named Jeremy and traded stories about what we saw. He was right around Melrose and Highland when it happened. According to the Los Angeles Police Department, the driver was pronounced dead at the scene shortly after 4:25 am Initially, neither the department nor the Los Angeles County coroner's office could positively identify the victim because the body was too badly burned. On Wednesday, the coroner confirmed the body taken from the vehicle was Hastings but said it would likely take several weeks to determine a cause of death.
The crash remains under investigation, the LAPD said on Thursday, but police officials told the Los Angeles Times they do not suspect foul play. Hastings, a Vermont native whose 2010 Rolling Stone profile of US Gen.
was hired by BuzzFeed last spring to cover President Barack Obama's 2012 re-election campaign and had been working for the site's 6-month-old Los Angeles bureau. News of Hastings' death was met with a variety of conspiracy theories.
According to the Times, he had been working on a story about Jill Kelley, a Florida socialite who recently filed a privacy lawsuit against the Department of Defense and the FBI. On Wednesday, WikiLeaks claimed Hastings had contacted a lawyer for the anti-secrecy organization shortly before the crash. "Michael Hastings contacted WikiLeaks lawyer Jennifer Robinson just a few hours before he died, saying that the FBI was investigating him," WikiLeaks wrote on Twitter: Michael Hastings contacted WikiLeaks lawyer Jennifer Robinson just a few hours before he died, saying that the FBI was investigating him.
"He wrote stories that would otherwise have gone unwritten, and without him there are great stories that will go untold." "Great reporters exude a certain kind of electricity," Rolling Stone Managing Editor Will Dana said in a statement of his own. "The sense that there are stories burning inside them, and that there's no higher calling or greater way to live life than to be always relentlessly trying to find and tell those stories. I'm sad that I'll never get to publish all the great stories that he was going to write."
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