Pringle, 3 Aides Escape Serious Injury in Crash; Police Cite Other Driver

Assembly Speaker Curt Pringle and three staff members were involved in a collision early Tuesday in Burbank that caused his vehicle to flip over and land upside down, but nobody was seriously injured, authorities said.

Investigators said Pringle, a Republican from Garden Grove, and his staff members were struck by another motorist who ran a red light and may have been saved by wearing seat belts.

“It would appear to me that seat belts were a major factor, since there were minor injuries in an accident in which the vehicle had flipped,” Burbank Police Lt. Don Brown said.

The crash occurred when Pringle and the staffers were headed to the Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena Airport for a 6 a.m. chartered flight to Northern California.

After the crash, the speaker’s group “crawled out” from underneath his toppled Ford Explorer and rushed to make the flight to Hanford, where Pringle was scheduled to speak at 7:30 a.m., said John Nelson, Pringle’s spokesman.

“They did make the appointment,” Nelson said. “A van [from the airport] came and picked them up. . . . They were only two blocks away.”

Staffer Brad Wilkinson, who works out of Pringle’s Garden Grove office, was driving the state-issued Explorer about 5:45 a.m. headed west on Thornton Avenue. That’s when police allege a 67-year-old woman driving a Jeep Cherokee ran a red light at Buena Vista Street and broadsided the Explorer in an intersection.

The impact of the crash sent Pringle’s vehicle rolling across the road, landing upside down with “the roofs pretty well crushed,” Nelson said.

“It’s just miraculous that no one was seriously hurt,” he said.

Pringle, who was in the front passenger seat, cut his elbow and Wilkinson reported a stiff neck after the crash, but both declined medical treatment, Burbank police said.

The other two passengers in the vehicle--B.J. Watrous and Jeff Flint, Pringle’s deputy chief of staff--were not injured, authorities said.

Investigators said the driver of the Jeep, who also was wearing a seat belt and did not report any injuries, was cited by Burbank police on suspicion of running a red light.