Soichiro said:
A 29 year old employee of the company I work for was killed yesterday racing his Mazda RX7 on the street.
Gwinnett police seek second car in fatal street race
By MARK DAVIS
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Sherwin Moreno may have won the race, say Gwinnett County police, but he lost his life.
Now investigators are searching for what they think may have been a second car participating in an illegal drag race early Sunday morning at an industrial park near the Gwinnett-DeKalb line.
Police theorize that Moreno's modified 1987 Mazda RX-7 was not the only car hurtling north on a narrow, straight stretch of Ponce de Leon Circle about 3:30 a.m. Sunday, said Cpl. Dan Huggins, a spokesman for the Gwinnett Police Department.
"The evidence we're looking at indicated that they were either racing, or they were there to see racing," Huggins said.
The report, said an official with the Governor's Office of Highway Safety, sounded all too familiar.
"I hear more and more reports of law enforcement having issues with drag racing," said Ricky Rich, director of law enforcement services for the governor's safety program.
The reports have come from Cobb and Gwinnett counties, where police so far this year have investigated three other fatal incidents of alleged illegal drag racing.
According to investigators, Moreno's Mazda, fitted with a roll cage, failed to stop where Ponce de Leon dead-ends into Button Gwinnett Drive.
The Mazda began skidding at about 90 mph, screeched 391 feet through the intersection and struck a curb on Button Gwinnett. Then it went airborne, flying over a low stand of bushes and crashing into a truck trailer 20 feet below in the parking lot of Schutz Container Systems, police said.
Moreno, who turned 29 less than two weeks ago, was pronounced dead at Dunwoody Medical Center, said Huggins.
Moreno left behind a girlfriend and child, Huggins said. If Moreno's crash is linked to illegal drag racing, his death will be the sixth such fatality in the metro area this year.
In February, Matthew Lane, 17, the son of a Snellville police officer, was killed in a three-car wreck on U.S. 78 that police attributed to street racing.
The next month, say police, Gwinnett teens Wendy Jennings and Susan Osley got into an impromptu race on Peachtree Parkway that ended when Jennings flipped her BMW and it landed in the path of a car driven by Julia Burns, 61. Burns and a passenger, Jacob Miller, 17, were killed.
Police have charged each teen in connection with the crash.
In May, Cobb police investigated what they said was an illegal drag race on Interstate North Parkway that killed Charles E. Perry, 28, of Union City, S.C., and Hayden Joseph Wallace, 25, of Easley, S.C. Police said they were back-seat passengers in a 1998 Chevrolet Z-28 driven by Scott M. Alexander of Easley.
Rich, who helps the Governor's Office of Highway Safety conduct seat belt and DUI enforcement programs, wonders if recent films, especially "The Fast and the Furious," a 2001 movie about drag racers, have glorified illegal racing.
"After that movie came out," he said, "I got more reports about drag racing from police chiefs."
ruins it for the rest of us, but finding scapegoats annoy me. There are people in rust boxes dragging each other too. This is why i got hounded in my car, it looks like an import car so he MUST drag race
