Excessive Speed, Alcohol Likely to Blame for First Crest Wreck

The 21-year-old Pasadena man who died after his car slammed into an embankment on Angeles Crest Highway, just one week after it re-opened, may have been drinking with friends in the Angeles National Forest, the reported.

Los Angeles County Fire Capt. Bob Funke told the Valley Sun Friday that he was a first responder to the scene just after 4 a.m. Funke told the paper that he did not see any obvious signs that Julio Cesar Velasquez hit the brakes before the crash.

Funke told the paper that Velasquez' friends had been drinking and being social in the George’s Gap area of the Angeles National Forest, an isolated spot near Clear Creek.

"The driver of the vehicle decided he wanted to go home. They tried to talk him out of driving, but to no avail,” the paper quoted Funke as saying. “About 35 or 40 minutes later, [the friends] were driving down and came upon [Velasquez’s] car embedded in the side of a hill. He had run head-on into a tree, and that’s how we found him.”

The California Highway Patrol Friday morning told Patch that Velasquez drove his 2007 Honda westbound on the Crest, lost control and traveled in a northeasterly direction until he rammed into an ascending embankment and crashed into a tree. Authorities pronounced him dead at the scene.

A spokesman from the Los Angeles County Department of Coroner said toxicology tests would take several weeks.

The fatal wreck happened one week after state transportation officials reopened the sinuous 7-mile stretch of highway between La Cañada Flintridge and Angeles Forest Highway. It had been closed for a year and a half after the 2009 Station Fire.