Cops: Wrong-Way Driver Hit Officer Head On

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A 21-year-old St. Petersburg woman faces a DUI charge after police officers say she went the wrong way on Martin Luther King Street and crashed into a marked cruiser.

The accident happened just after 3 a.m. Friday when an officer was struck head-on by a vehicle heading north in the southbound lanes of Martin Luther King Street.

According to the police department, the officer had just turned from 103rd Avenue North onto Martin Luther King when he spotted a woman in a green Lexus going the wrong way and flipped on his emergency lights.

The woman, however, “failed to yield to the emergency vehicle and proceeded through the red light at Gandy Boulevard, striking the officer’s vehicle as he tried to avoid her,” an email from the department to media stated.

The officer’s cruiser was spun around and pushed onto the grass at the intersection’s northwest corner, the department stated.

The crash was radioed in by the officer, but he then failed to respond to radio calls. Dispatchers were able to use GPS to confirm his location and send first responders to the scene.

Fellow officers found him “laying in the grass beside his cruiser, conscious but dazed by the crash,” the email stated.

The officer has since been treated and released from a local hospital.

The driver of the other car, Madison Pratt Best, was not injured. After refusing field sobriety and breath tests, she was charged with DUI and taken to the Pinellas County Jail.

Best was being held at the jail Friday morning in lieu of $500 bond.

Photo courtesy of the Pinellas County Jail