A 23-year-old Lowell man is facing manslaughter and other charges after prosecutors say he was driving 103 mph while fleeing the scene of a separate crash on Boston's Jamaicaway before slamming head-on into a car carrying a pregnant woman, killing her unborn child. Luis Bermudez Torres was arrested Monday morning in Boxford after a grand jury indictment, and he was ordered held on $50,000 bail.
According to NBC Boston, Bermudez Torres crashed into another car at an intersection on the Jamaicaway and then drove away at high speed rather than stopping. That is when prosecutors say he lost control of his vehicle and struck the pregnant woman's car head-on. The posted speed limit on that stretch of the Jamaicaway is 25 mph, meaning Bermudez Torres was allegedly traveling more than four times the legal limit at the moment of impact.
The 39-year-old expecting mother suffered a fractured wrist and other blunt-force injuries, the outlet reports. A passenger riding in her car was not hurt. Bermudez Torres and his girlfriend, who were in the car with him, were also injured in the crash. The station's report notes the couple had left an event at Franklin Field at about 10 p.m. before the chain of crashes unfolded.
Charges Include Manslaughter and Reckless Homicide
Bermudez Torres was indicted on charges including manslaughter, assault and battery with a deadly weapon, and reckless motor vehicle homicide, per the same account. As a condition of his release, he was ordered not to drive. His next court hearing is scheduled for November 2.
The involuntary manslaughter charge will require prosecutors to meet a demanding legal bar. Under precedent stemming from Commonwealth v. Welansky, prosecutors must show that a defendant intentionally chose a course of conduct carrying a high degree of risk to human life and consciously disregarded that danger — a higher threshold than ordinary negligence. Separately, Massachusetts law allows homicide charges over the death of a viable unborn fetus under the state's motor vehicle homicide statute, a standard first established in the 1984 case Commonwealth v. Cass. A conviction on the motor vehicle homicide charge under Chapter 90, Section 24G(b), carries a potential sentence of two and a half to 15 years in state prison, or up to two and a half years in a house of correction, along with fines and mandatory license revocation, according to Mass.gov.
A Parkway With a Long History of Danger
The Jamaicaway is a four-lane undivided parkway running through Boston's Jamaica Plain neighborhood, managed by the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation and originally designed by Frederick Law Olmsted as part of the Emerald Necklace park system. Hoodline has previously reported on the parkway's narrow, carriage-road design and its history of frequent collisions, including a multi-agency police chase that ended on the same corridor earlier this month.
In 2019, DCR lowered the posted speed limit along the Jamaicaway and the adjoining Arborway from 35 mph to 25 mph in an effort to curb severe collisions, according to Streetsblog Massachusetts. The corridor is also designated part of Boston's High Crash Network under the city's Vision Zero initiative, which flags urban roads with high concentrations of fatal and severe injury crashes. DCR regulations bar commercial trucks from using the parkway, reserving it mainly for passenger vehicles, per a City of Boston report.
The road's hazards have drawn recent attention from state lawmakers. Chapter 101 of the Acts of 2026 appropriated $75,000 to DCR specifically for maintenance, traffic, and safety improvements on the Jamaicaway, according to the Massachusetts General Court. In January, multiple multi-vehicle collisions struck the corridor within an hour near Bynner and Perkins streets, sending two adults and two toddlers for emergency evaluation, as reported by Universal Hub.
Statewide, traffic fatalities have trended slightly downward, with preliminary National Highway Traffic Safety Administration figures showing Massachusetts deaths dropping 3% from 363 in 2024 to 352 in 2025, Hoodline has reported. But the string of incidents on the Jamaicaway suggests the parkway remains an outlier even as broader numbers improve.
