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LBPD officer heads off unconscious motorist

Collides with vehicle to save other drivers after car jumped Park Ave. median

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Long Beach police officer Brian Eidens headed east on West Park Avenue at about 7:40 p.m. on Sunday, when he heard a loud bang as he pulled up to the light at Lafayette Boulevard.

“I thought someone was in a car accident,” said Eidens, a 10-year member of the Police Department, who was working a 6 p.m. to 4 a.m. patrol that night. “I looked all around, and then I looked in my rearview mirror.”

Eidens, 35, became alarmed when he observed a white Nissan Altima moving erratically as it headed east on Park. The vehicle ultimately careered into the West Park Avenue median — home to the Firemen’s Memorial, between Lafayette and Washington boulevards — and toward oncoming traffic in Park Avenue’s westbound lanes.

“He had hit [the median] and started rolling over it,” said Eidens. “He hit the curb, and then hit the rocks, and then hit the sign.”

Initially, Eidens thought that another motorist had forced the driver onto the median and that the car would come to a stop.

“But, as I made the U-turn here on Lafayette, the car kept heading across the median, at a northeast angle, and was slow-rolling across the grass,” he said, “and at that point, since the car was still moving, either the person was unconscious or having a medical emergency.”

Eidens’s gut feeling was correct: the 37-year-old driver of the vehicle, Francis Kelly, it was later determined, had suffered a seizure behind the wheel. With a number of vehicles heading west as the driver bounced over the median and proceeded to head east in the westbound lane — and with some pedestrians in the area — Eidens had to act fast. He accelerated in an attempt to head off the vehicle.

“At that point, I made the U-turn on Lafayette … as quick as I could, and got over onto the westbound side, because he was coming onto westbound traffic,” the former New York City Police Department officer said. “And just as he was about to hop off the median, his foot must have moved and hit the gas and he floored it coming across the lanes and hit me pretty much head on. At first, I was trying to attempt to get to the vehicle before it struck anything else — whatever I could do to stop the car. But when he hit the gas, he gave me no choice really and he struck my vehicle.”

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