Paul Walker’s death details revealed
LOS ANGELES-The car carrying late ‘Fast and Furious’ star Paul Walker was doing over 100 miles (160 kilometers) per hour when it crashed, nearly cutting the high-powered vehicle in half, coroners said Friday.
The 40-year-old actor’s body was charred beyond recognition in the November 30 accident, they said in a report describing the burned-out wreckage in graphic detail. The $400,000 2005 car was driven by Walker’s friend Roger Rodas, who also died in the crash in Santa Clarita, north of Los Angeles, where they had attended a charity event. Neither man tested positive for alcohol or drugs including marijuana, cocaine, opiates and methamphetamine, a coroner’s report said, adding that autopsies were conducted on December 3, but toxicology results were only confirmed Friday.
‘The driver was driving a red Porsche Carrera GT at an unsafe speed, approximately 100-plus miles per hour,’ said the report, citing an investigator’s account of the crash. The report said Walker was found ‘wearing remnants of a black T-shirt, a pair of black jeans and a pair of gray boxer briefs’ and was ‘lying supine in the passenger seat.’ ‘The decedent was charred and in a pugilistic stance,’ it said, describing the posture of his body after the crash.
No drugs or alcohol were found in the bodies of ‘Fast & Furious’ actor Paul Walker and his friend Roger Rodas after the fiery car crash that killed them in November, a coroner’s report released on Friday said.
According to the autopsy report, Walker, 40, had numerous thermal and traumatic injuries including:
* Diffuse charring of the skin with sparing of the back, buttocks, and feet.
* Fractures of the right distal radius and ulna, likely heat related.
* Epidural clotting, right-sided.
* Scant soot present within the trachea.
* Left mandible fracture.
* Left clavicle fracture.
* Left humerus fracture.
* Multiple rib fractures.
* Multiple pelvic fractures.
* Nondisplaced spinal fracture at the level of T6.
Both Walker, 40, and Rodas, 38, tested negative for alcohol, and drugs including cocaine, opiates and marijuana were not detected, said the report from the Los Angeles County coroner’s office. The report included an early account of the accident from the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, dated December 1 - the day after the crash, saying the Porsche Carrera GT driven by Rodas was traveling at ‘an unsafe speed, approximately 100+ mph.’
But a sheriff’s spokeswoman said the investigation into the accident has not been completed and there was no definitive finding on the car’s speed. Both deaths were ruled accidents. Walker died from ‘combined effects of traumatic and thermal injuries,’ and Rodas from ‘multiple traumatic injuries,’ the report said. Walker was in the process of filming ‘Fast & Furious 7’ at the time and production was halted a few days later. Universal Pictures said last month that the release of the seventh installment in the highly lucrative franchise would be pushed back by nine months to April 2015. Walker will appear in the film.
Walker’s death stunned fans of the high-octane series ‘The Fast and the Furious,’ and was a major blow to studio giant Universal Pictures, for whom the franchise is a huge money maker.
Nation
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