Car crash causes Franklin St. in Westfield to be closed for several hours

WESTFIELD, MA (WGGB/WSHM) — New details are emerging about an accident in Westfield that closed part of Franklin Street for hours on Sunday.

Jim Leydon, spokesman for the Hampden District Attorney's Office, said Westfield police were called to the 0-100 block of Franklin Street, near the intersection with Kellogg Street, around 6 p.m. Sunday for a “serious motor vehicle accident” involving a 76-year-old Westfield man who was in a wheelchair.

“It appears the victim was struck while crossing the street in a crosswalk,” Leydon said, adding that the man was taken to Baystate Medical Center where he died.

“A car came at a man, an elderly man, almost 70 years old, in a wheelchair. He had an automatic wheelchair. He was crossing the street, a man, a woman, came into the street and almost rammed the wheelchair over there,” said Ridesh Badell, owner of Molt's Liquors.

Badell told Western Mass News that his customers witnessed a horrific car crash on Sunday around 5:30 p.m. He noted that he did not see the accident himself, but that panicked customers ran into his store to tell him that a man had been hit in the crosswalk.

“Customers would park their cars and come, and then they would see so many customers, almost five or six at a time, saying, 'Hey, something happened.' The whole street was blocked,” Badell explained.

Badell then went outside and reportedly saw a man in a wheelchair bleeding in the middle of the road. He believed the man was rolling across the crosswalk in his electric wheelchair when he was struck.

“I saw the wheelchair, it was right there, and then the man's wheelchair fell over in the street. He was out of the wheelchair and just laying in the street. He had a little blood in his mouth and on his head,” Badell said.

Badell added that the man in the wheelchair landed in the section of road that has now been marked with yellow paint.

The driver of the vehicle that hit the victim remained at the scene of the accident.

The incident remains under investigation by the Westfield Police Department and the District Attorney's Office's Homicide Unit.

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