Three people are dead after a wrong-way crash Sunday morning on Loop 101 Agua Fria.
Officials with the Arizona Department of Public Safety say at about 2:30 a.m., they started receiving calls about a wrong-way driver, traveling southbound in the northbound lanes of Loop 101 at Camelback Road.
A few minutes later, the wrong-way driver was involved in a crash in the northbound lanes.
The crash involved multiple vehicles and resulted in three deaths, said DPS.
The wrong-way driver is among those killed. One other person received minor injuries during the crash.
The cause of the crash remains under investigation. It is unclear if impairment is believed to be a factor.
A West Valley man says his daughter, Angel Marie Carillo Lopez, is one of the victims in the car struck by the wrong-way driver. Miguel Carillo's daughter died in the wreck, and was heading home from a local bar when the crash occurred.
"It's something you can't explain because it's something you don't expect to happen to your family, more so to a son or daughter. In this case, my daughter," said Carillo. "What I want to say is what happened to my daughter, the City of Phoenix needs to do more so that people will stop entering the freeway the wrong way. They need to put something. They need to do something. It's happening too often. People are dying because of a drunk driver. The City of Phoenix needs to do something here."
DPS has officially identified the people killed as 23-year-old Caleb Bencomo of Phoenix, 29-year-old Angel Carrillo-Lopez of Glendale, and 27-year-old Reginald Porter of Los Angeles.
In 2017, the Arizona Department of Transportation unveiled a pilot program that installed wrong-way driving detectors along the I-17 from the I-10 stack to the Loop 101 in North Phoenix. The $4 million project was approved by Proposition 400 in 2004, and detects wrong-way drivers and notifies other drivers via message boards.
DPS has not identified anyone involved in the crash.
