A 37-year-old Inverness man is dead after a four-vehicle crash on the southbound entrance ramp from State Road 44 to I-75 in Sumter County early Wednesday morning. The man was driving a Toyota Tundra when he overtook and rear-ended a southbound tractor-trailer, setting off a chain of collisions that also pulled in a Hyundai sedan and a second, parked tractor-trailer.
According to the Tampa Free Press, the crash happened around 6:20 a.m. near mile marker 329, right where the ramp feeds onto the interstate. After the Hyundai struck the pickup, the force of that collision pushed the pickup truck onto the highway's outside shoulder, where it crashed into a parked, occupied tractor-trailer. The driver of that parked rig was identified as a 34-year-old Georgia man.
Pickup Driver Died at the Hospital
Emergency crews transported the Tundra's driver to an area hospital, where he later died from his injuries, the outlet's report notes. The southbound tractor-trailer the Inverness man rear-ended was being driven by a 56-year-old Hialeah man, while a 25-year-old Jacksonville man was behind the wheel of the Hyundai sedan that struck the pickup during the pileup.
Florida Highway Patrol has not released the names of the drivers involved, and per the same account, no other injuries were reported at the scene beyond the fatal ones suffered by the Inverness man.
Another Deadly Pileup Hit the Same Stretch
A late-night pileup involving four tractor-trailers a few miles south of the Wildwood exit killed a 60-year-old Georgia man and seriously injured another driver, according to fox13news.com. That crash struck at 11:34 p.m., after an earlier three-vehicle collision scattered debris across the southbound lanes.
Florida Highway Patrol said that earlier wreck began when a tractor-trailer collided with a Ford F350 towing a motorhome near Wildwood around 10:20 p.m., touching off the chain reaction that followed. All southbound lanes of I-75 were shut down during the response and did not reopen until around noon the next day, fox13news.com reported.
It remains unclear whether Wednesday's ramp crash triggered any similar closures on I-75, and authorities had not released further details on the circumstances of the collision as of the latest reporting.
