SEQUIM — A Carlsborg man may have died or suffered an unknown “catastrophic illness” while driving eastbound on West Washington Street before his vehicle crashed into a light pole at the Walgreens parking lot early Tuesday, police said.
Harold Van Riper, a Parkwood Estates resident who was almost 81, was pronounced dead at the scene after his car smashed into a light pole at about 6:37 a.m.
He was eastbound on West Washington Street when witnesses said he gunned the engine, crossing West Washington into the corner of the parking lot at the Rite Aid store.
His 2007 Honda CR-V bolted through two landscape embankments, shot across a sidewalk and two lanes of North Fifth Avenue near the intersection of Washington Street, crossed another sidewalk and smashed into a concrete-supported light pole at the Walgreens store parking lot at 490 West Washington St.
Police don’t believe Van Riper, who was on his way to a doctor’s appointment at the Jamestown Family Health Clinic on North Fifth Avenue, was killed by the impact of the crash.
“We do not believe that the nature of the collision would support a fatality,” said Detective Sean Madison, one of the Sequim police traffic investigators on the scene Tuesday morning.
“A catastrophic illness was more likely than the collision itself” as the cause of death, he said, though the vehicle sustained severe front-end damage.
“There’s nothing that the first officer at the scene saw that would correlate with the damage of the car,” Madison said.
No others were injured in the crash.
The front dashboard airbag was deployed, and Van Riper was wearing a seat belt at the time of the crash. He had no visible head or other fatal injuries.
Madison said he would report the case to the Clallam County coroner but that he did not believe an autopsy was necessary to find the cause of death.
Madison said it appeared that the motorist’s foot was stuck on the accelerator, which Madison said is not uncommon in such crashes.
After the one-car crash at the busy downtown intersection, a trail of landscape bark and branches was left strewn across North Fifth Avenue.
“It’s probably a good thing that it was where it was or the pole was where it was,” Madison said.
“Otherwise, it would have drove on into Walgreens.”
The vehicle came to rest about 30 feet from the drug store’s entrance on the northeast corner of West Washington Street and North Fifth Avenue.
Traffic was not interrupted at the intersection because the vehicle did not block the street.
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Editor Jeff Chew can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at jeff.chew@peninsuladailynews.com.
