Wildwood mayor has stern message for participants of unsanctioned car event that turned deadly
WILDWOOD, N.J. (CBS) -- Weekend street racing at the Jersey Shore turned deadly and the community is demanding answers. The mayor of Wildwood is speaking out about the chaos in his town over the weekend.
Officers identified the man under arrest as Gerald White of Pittsburgh.
Investigators pinpoint this as being moments after the deadly collisions along Atlantic Avenue that killed Lindsay Weakland of Carlisle and Timothy Ogden of Clayton. An additional two people were hurt.
Arrest papers allege White was with a group of some 500 that flooded the island Saturday.
Videos show and eyewitnesses say the evening was marred by drag racing and dangerous tricks and spin-outs.
There were numerous crashes, including a family of four with two young girls riding on a golf cart struck Saturday night. The mom tells CBS Philadelphia off camera her children saw a doctor Monday afternoon and should be OK.
The driver of the striking vehicle has not been charged.
Gary Robinson's paint store sits at the intersection where it happened and says the city was inundated with cars drag racing and doing all sorts of dangerous stunts.
"Group of kids that had no care in the world and there's so many cars here," Robinson said. "Usually, we have the car shows. All the good car shows were here, but this group was not authorized to come here. They just took over."
About a mile away, memorials grow for Weakland and Ogden.
Ogden from Clayton was in a car when police say Gerald White smashed into it.
Weakland was walking along Atlantic when she was hit and killed.
Video sent to CBS Philadelphia exclusively shows White being cuffed and taken into custody while officers trained to maintain order.
The group, identified by police and prosecutors as H2Oi, had run afoul of Ocean City, Maryland, officials in recent years.
Mayor Pete Byron says while intelligence gave police a heads up to possibly prepare for the group, resources quickly thinned out.
"We figured we were prepared," Byron said, "and no one was prepared for what happened on Saturday night when all these cars that were all over Cape May County wreaking havoc all over converged onto Wildwood. We were just outmanned."
Byron shared a stern message to the participants of the unsanctioned car event.
"We have some hard work that we have to do," Mayor Pete Byron said. "But I will tell those participants that we got them. We have cameras all over town. We have them on streets that they don't even know about. So we have their license numbers, we have their license plates. So they will be getting a certified letter from the City of Wildwood sometime in the near future."
"We're going to make it that they'll never want to come back to Wildwood again, quite frankly," Byron added. "They took an event, a traditional car show that has been around for 35 years that is such a great, friendly family fun time and they destroyed it. They really did. I hate parents calling me, grandparents calling me saying they're afraid to take their kids out because of this. That's not what Wildwood's about."
Things got so out of control that the city ordered the bridge of Rio Grande Avenue to all traffic coming into the island Saturday night.
The mayor says the city reached out to Gov. Phil Murphy and additional police resources were sent in to get a handle on things.
