It appears that early yesterday morning someone used a street takeover to kill two people in Compton, California, just outside of Los Angeles. As street takeovers are becoming more popular, it was only a matter of time before they would escalate beyond being just a sideshow for car enthusiasts and involve car accidents and injuries. What are they? 

These street takeovers can involve hundreds of cars and many more bystanders

Street takeovers are when sometimes hundreds of cars gather at a predetermined site. Some of the cars are used to block off a fairly large intersection. Then, other cars come into that intersection to do donuts. You’ll usually come across the aftermath, which is circular skid marks in a random intersection. 

The problem with controlling them is that it takes time for police enforcement to arrive. Multiple police resources need to be coordinated before they can show up. Once the first sign of police activity, like a helicopter or police car, gets near a takeover, everyone scatters. That includes the many bystanders that come to watch the cars skid around. 

Street takeovers usually take in several intersections in a single night

Usually, the participants set up another location and have multiple roving street takeovers on a given night. One resource for police is social media. License plates, if visible, can be traced. Warnings and/or citations are the result. 

In the case of the two Compton deaths, they were not a direct result of the cars doing donuts according to NBC News. Police responding to the street takeover. found the two young men inside of a gray Kia. While watching the cars doing donuts at the takeover intersection they were killed. 

Numerous deaths have occurred at several Compton street takeovers

This isn’t the first time someone was killed at a takeover in Compton. A vehicle fleeing a street takeover killed a mother in October 2019. The vehicle, driving between 80-100 mph, according to police, lost control and slammed into a group of people on a sidewalk. Eight others were injured, some critically, besides the death of the 23-year-old mother. 

Exactly a year later, just a few miles south in Orange County, several street takeovers happened. At one in Costa Mesa, a pickup doing donuts flipped around 2:30 AM, killing one of two passengers inside. The other passenger was seriously injured and had to be taken to the hospital. 

Earlier that morning, the same group of about 200 cars gathered in Anaheim in the shadow of Disneyland, to do a street takeover. According to eyewitnesses and cell phone videos, a car trying to do donuts backward struck an 18-year-old woman. Being thrown into the air, she received moderate injuries. A 19-year-old was arrested for felony hit-and-run and reckless driving. 

One takeover included an officer-involved shooting

In early 2020 a street takeover in Fountain Valley, adjacent to Costa Mesa, started early one morning with a fireworks display. It ended with a police chase and an officer-involved shooting. The 21-year-old shooter was arrested for assault with a deadly weapon, obstructing, and resisting arrest. 

Typically, a bystander is either hit or clipped by a car doing donuts when a person is injured at a takeover, There are too many accidents like this around the country to list here. The snapshot of injuries and death we provide here all happened within a 20-mile area in Southern California.