Plymouth police probe whether crash was caused by a texting driver

By Travis Andersen, Globe Staff

Plymouth police are investigating whether a woman was texting behind the wheel moments before her car went off the road and smashed into a tree early Sunday morning on Bourne Road.

The driver of the car remained hospitalized at South Shore Hospital in Weymouth with injuries that were not life threatening while the passenger was treated and released at Jordan Hospital in Plymouth following the 4:18 a.m. crash.

Plymouth Police Captain John W. Rogers Jr. said both the driver and the passenger were Plymouth residents, but he declined to release their names because the cause of the crash remains under investigation. He said the possibility that the driver was texting was one thing being explored.

“We are trying to confirm whether that was the case or not,’’ he said.

On Sunday, Bourne Road resident Barbara Bracken told the Globe that a vehicle took out a fence on her property and hit a tree before coming to rest on the side of a neighbor’s yard. She said she gave her cellphone to the passenger, a woman who appeared to be about 19 and who was sitting on a curb, so she could call her mother.

Bracken said the passenger told a police officer that she and the driver had been drinking at White Horse Beach and that she warned the driver to stop texting before the crash.

“She said, ‘I told my friend, stop texting, we’re going to hit a tree,’” the 66-year-old Bracken recalled.

Bracken said the passenger’s arm was bleeding before she was placed into an ambulance.

“She was very shaken up,” she said.

Another neighbor, Sabrina Geller, 34, said she heard a loud screech and the sound of a car horn at about 4:15 a.m. She and her husband then stepped outside their home and found the damaged sedan in their yard.

Geller said the passenger had been thrown from the car, and that rescuers used the Jaws of Life to extricate the driver.

“All I could think about was those moms and the phone calls they were going to get,” Geller said. “It was very obvious speed had to have been a factor.”

She said the passenger and the driver were both able to move after the accident.