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WASHINGTON - A car wash employee suffered seizure while driving a van out of a Northwest Washington car wash Tuesday, striking and injuring two fellow employees in the process, police said.
Earl Risby was outside, at 13th and O streets, Tuesday afternoon and watched as the employee at the Mr. Wash drove the white van out of the car wash so it could be dried. He watched in horror as the driver -- who suffered a seizure, police said -- ran over two of his fellow co-workers who were in the midst of drying off a blue SUV.
"I looked up and I seen the van come out -- all of a sudden it accelerated," Risby recalled.
"The back of the tire hit one dude on the leg. The guy in the middle of the street, it ran right over top of him," he added.
Police said the van then raced across 13th street, smashing into a silver Subaru, whose owners later came to the scene
"I love that car," Susan Somera, the owner, said. "It's been with us for a long, long while. The first car we had here in America."
The van then crashed into the garage of the Solo Piazza Condominiums, where the front desk manager said the end of the crash was caught on surveillance video.
"I saw when they hit the garage door," Safwat Ibrahim, the front desk manager, said.
It was first thought that one of the employees struck was in critical condition, but doctors later told police they expected him to pull through.
As for the driver whose suspected seizure led to all of this, everyone here said they understood it was just an accident.
"He is very sick. I don't think that he is in a good situation," Ibrahim said.
"We pity him because, you know what, it's an accident," Eduardo Somera, a co-owner of the smashed Subaru, added.
It happened at the Mr. Wash in the 1300 block of 13th Street NW in the Logan Circle neighborhood shortly after 12:30 p.m.
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