Police: 1 dead, 3 critical in prisoner van crash

HATTIESBURG, Miss. — A private guard driving a prisoner van was killed and several others were injured, three critically, when the van carrying three guards and nine inmates drove off an interstate, hitting an embankment and trees before flipping over Sunday, police said.

The van was carrying prisoners from Texas and Louisiana to different detention centers located along the U.S. East coast. All 12 occupants had to be cut from the crumpled wreckage of the white van, which lay on its roof with its windows shattered amid broken trees.

The van’s driver, a 50-year-old security officer for a private prisoner transport agency, was pronounced dead by coroner’s officials at the site of the single-vehicle crash off Interstate 59 in the Hattiesburg area, police said.

“The vehicle left the roadway on the right shoulder, collided with a raised embankment and slid and hit a couple trees before landing on its roof,” Hattiesburg Police Department spokesman Synarus Green told The Associated Press in an interview.

One guard and two prisoners remained in critical condition, Sgt. Green said.

“Most of the prisoners were either from Louisiana or Texas and going to some portion of the United States,” he said, adding injured prisoners reported they were asleep when the accident occurred around 7 a.m. Sunday.

But he had no further details where the prisoners came from, nor their identities and whether they were headed when the van crashed early Sunday off a four lane highway. He said no foul play was suspected and the van was the only vehicle involved in the accident.

He said the van landed amid broken trees, complicating the work of rescue crews.

“The front nose of the van is kind of short. So when it crushed back it kind of pinned both doors and so both of the front passengers had to be cut out. And they cut off the front end of the vehicle so where the prisoners were it’s all closed off with the mesh gates over the windows so those they had to be cut out as well,” Green said.

Green said another security guard and six other prisoners remained hospitalized with various injuries. Another prisoner was treated and released Sunday and was being held at a regional jail in Forrest County, he added.

The conditions of the injured were not immediately released by authorities late Sunday.

Green said authorities were not releasing further information about the driver or the company of the private transport agency that he worked for until relatives have been notified. Other occupants also were not identified.

Police said they were called shortly before 7 a.m. to an area off Interstate 59 in the Hattiesburg. Green said the van had driven off the right shoulder of the road, smashing into the elevated embankment before coming to rest on its roof.

He said ambulances took the injured to hospitals and detectives had gone to the scene Sunday trying to reconstruct the accident.

Police said the van was owned by a private agency.