Police release cause of Tiger Woods's wreck: excessive speed, as reported from Yahoo Sports April 7th, 2021
Ken Panciera
Marketing and Sales, Private Client Group, Personal Lines Department, Starkweather & Shepley Insurance
While distracted driving remains one of the top reasons for auto accidents, speed ranks right up there. And besides having your auto rates increase because of a moving violation, the risk of what happened to Tiger Woods, or even worse, should be motivation enough to drive more carefully. Story follows....
AUGUSTA, Ga. — On the eve of the Masters, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department has released the cause of the February wreck where Tiger Woods suffered extensive injury: excessive speed.
Early in the morning of Feb. 24, Woods was driving in the Rancho Palos Verdes area of Los Angeles, en route to a golf course where he was filming a new show, when his SUV left the road and flipped several times before coming to rest on its side. In a news conference Wednesday, law enforcement said Woods was driving around 84-87 mph in a 45-mph zone.
Woods was taken to a nearby hospital with severe injuries to his right leg; he returned home to Florida several weeks later.
Woods apparently lost control of the vehicle upon entering a sharp turn. Woods has little to no memory of the accident, and suffered several blows to the head during the wreck. Deputies on the scene said there was no evidence of Woods being under the influence of drugs or alcohol.
The L.A. County Sheriff's Department did not seek a search warrant for Woods' blood samples or cell phone records, saying there was no probable cause for a criminal investigation. The department did obtain a search warrant for the data recorder of the 2021 Genesis GV80 SUV. However, the department did not forward any criminal charges to the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office.
The sheriff's department had determined the cause of the wreck last week, but held off on releasing it publicly until consulting with Woods' team, a move that drew charges of special treatment.
"We have reached out to Tiger Woods and his personnel," Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva said last week. "There's some privacy issues on releasing information on the investigation, so we're going to ask them if they waive the privacy, and then we will be able to do a full release on all the information regarding the accident."
Woods has not been seen publicly since the accident, but has been in regular communication with several of his fellow players, and has tweeted out occasional updates and messages to his fans. The full extent of Woods' injuries, to say nothing of his return to the golf course, remains unknown.