2 men escape sinking truck after pick-up slides into Walpole pond overnight Sunday

WALPOLE, Mass. — It took not just a towing company but also scuba diver to recover a pick-up truck in Walpole early Sunday morning after that truck slid off icy Oak Street and into a retaining pond. A driver and passenger managed to escape the sinking vehicle.

“They did get out through a window,” said Sergeant Jim O’Connell of Walpole Police of the two people involved in the crash. “But the truck did go all the way down. It was in about 10 feet of water.”

The two men were heading down Oak Street in a pick-up when their truck veered into serious trouble, crashing through a stone wall and ending up underwater.

“Sometimes you can't open the door because of the pressure, so basically the only way you could get out would be through a window,” Sergeant O’Connell said of the victims’ escape from the truck.

The incident happened at 2 a.m. some neighbors even slept through it.

“By the time I saw it, [the] truck was partly out of the water,” said Miguel Zialcita, a neighbor. “They were just trying to secure it.”

The men escaped the sinking truck with nothing but hypothermia. But how did the vehicle end up from the street into the pond? Well, for one thing, it was snowy and icy. And for another, the driver told police that a dog ran in front of the vehicle.

This is not the first time an animal has gotten the blame for a vehicle ending up in that pond. In 2013, another pick-up truck took a dive in the same pond after the driver swerved, he said, to avoid a deer.

But to neighbor Jim D'Ovidio, a wayward dog at 2 a.m. seems a stretch.

“I don't know of any dogs that are out in this neighborhood,” he said. “Everybody that I know, all my neighbors that have dogs, they're all in the house.”

D'Ovidio has lived in the area for 30 years. He says the larger issue has been the use of Oak Street as a cut-through by drivers.

“And they don't go slow,” he said. “They really don't go slow.”

Speed wasn’t cited as a factor in the crash.

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