A car struck a bus shelter in Longueuil, Que., on Friday, injuring several people and pinning two of them under the vehicle until a group of bystanders worked together to lift the car and rescue them.
The car struck the bus shelter at the corner of Victoria Avenue and St-Louis Street in the LeMoyne neighbourhood around noon, a spokesperson for CETAM, the ambulance service that serves Montreal’s South Shore, said in an interview.
An elderly woman who was parked in the parking lot of the nearby McDonald’s restaurant mistook the gas pedal for the brake and hit the bus shelter, the spokesperson, Renaud Pilon, said.
Two people, teens aged 18 or 19, were pinned under the car. A third person, a 25-year-old, was also injured in the leg.
A group of young people saw the incident, Pilon said, and rushed in to help. Together, a group of five of them managed to lift the car and extricate the two people stuck beneath it.
Ambulances and other emergency vehicles transported three people to the hospital, Pilon said. One person, who was caught completely beneath the car, had serious injuries, but she was considered to be in stable condition by 1 p.m.
Longueuil police said in a post on Facebook that four people, including the driver of the car, a woman in her 70s, were injured and needed to be hospitalized.
An image of the scene showed multiple emergency vehicles, including two ambulances, a fire truck and multiple police officers.