Before fatal crash, wrong-way driver screamed: 'You guys ready to die?'
Comments (...)(MCT) — As Gustavo Vargas drove off from a Harvey strip club after a night of drinking for the Super Bowl, he kept taunting his three buddies by screaming, "You guys ready to die? You guys ready to die?"
His friends thought he was just "fooling around" but grew worried as Vargas kept yelling and "driving crazy" down the highway. Eduardo Rodriguez, sitting in the back seat, said he and his friends Jorge Pina and Armando Ruiz warned Vargas for what seemed like an hour not to do anything foolish.
But as they neared Hazel Crest on Interstate 80, Vargas made a sharp U-turn and headed back the wrong way, colliding with another car and killing himself and three other people early Monday, said Rodriguez, the lone survivor.
"He was driving crazy, we told him to stop and he wouldn't listen," Rodriguez said Tuesday from his hospital bed. "He was saying, 'You guys ready to die? You guys ready to die?' He was screaming, and then we told him to stop, to stop playing around. Stop, stop. He didn't want to listen."
The last thing Vargas said was that he wanted to go back to the club, Rodriguez said. But soon after making the U-turn, Vargas' Infiniti collided head-on with a Ford Escort station wagon driven by Jason Wepsiec, of Joliet.
Wepsiec, 34, was killed, along with Vargas, 28, of Berwyn; Pina, 27, of Chicago; and Ruiz, 29, of Berwyn. Rodriguez, 28, suffered a broken arm and a broken finger.
"I guess it's not my time to go yet," he said at Advocate Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn, where Rodriguez painfully recounted details of the crash.
Vargas, Ruiz, Pina and Rodriguez had been drinking at Marlins, a bar in Lyons where they watched the Super Bowl Sunday night. They then decided to go bar-hopping and went to the Skybox gentlemen's club in Harvey, where they stayed until about 12:30 a.m.
Rodriguez said everyone had been drinking, including Vargas.
As they left the Harvey club, Rodriguez said, he became increasingly afraid of his friend's words.
"I told him to stop saying that, we kept telling him to stop the car but he didn't want to listen," Rodriguez said.
"He kept going, going, going. … I thought he was joking. Everybody told him to quit fooling around."
Around Kedzie Avenue, Vargas said he wanted to go back to the bar and keep drinking and turned the steering wheel sharply, Rodriguez said.
"He turned a U-turn like he was going back to the bar," Rodriguez said. "I'm a little bit (angry), I don't know what to say."
The last thing he remembers was the force of the crash, then his arm in pain and trying to escape the wreckage. "I kept trying to get out of the door, little by little, and some girl pulls me," he said.
He said he didn't know that his friends and the other driver had been killed until he was in the hospital.
Rodriguez, 28, of Cicero, attended Morton West High School in Berwyn with Vargas and Ruiz and knew them for years. Pina was a friend of Vargas'.
Rodriguez said Vargas was a "little character" who always tried to get a laugh.
"It was a stupid joke," Rodriguez said of his friend's final actions.
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