Two weeks after a Toyota Prius crashed into a stone wall in Westchester County, the Harrison police say that the crash was caused by the driver who didn't brake. Acting police chief Anthony Marraccini said that information from the car's black box showed that the car was actually accelerating, "The data is black and white."
At the time of the crash, the driver, housekeeper Gloria Rosel who was driving her employer's car, told the police she was braking, and Rosel's employer said, "It was clearly the automobile and not anything else." But last week, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said, based on their investigation, that the driver wasn't braking. And Marraccinni said, "She believes she depressed the brake, but that just simply isn't the case here." But Rosel won't face charges, because he doesn't believe she meant to deceive the cops.
Marraccini, who previously blasted Toyota for not cooperating, appeared at a new conference with Toyota's Northeast public affairs manager Wage Hoyt. The Journal News reports that Hoyt praised the police department, "They did a really outstanding bit of detective work," while "Marraccini said he went on a test drive in a comparable Prius and that it 'performed very well' under extreme conditions, stopping when 30 pounds of pressure were applied to brakes against a floored accelerator."
