Two in BMW Killed After Crashing Into Chicago Restaurant

Jose Sanchez was about to give three tacos to a customer when a black BMW slammed into his family’s restaurant late Sunday night in the Little Village neighborhood on the West Side.

“We heard a car braking and then a boom,” said Sanchez, 27. “Next thing we know things were falling on top of us, and we were picking ourselves up from the floor.”

Sanchez, 27, who was working as a cashier at Sanchez Tacos, 4001 W. Ogden Ave., said he, the customer and another worker who was in the restaurant during the crash got away with minor cuts.

But two men were killed and a Chicago police sergeant was injured in the accident that occured around 11 p.m., police said.

Police said the black BMW was speeding west on Ogden before hitting a Chicago police car sitting in traffic. The car then crashed into a building at Ogden and Pulaski Road, said Officer Amina Greer, a Chicago police spokeswoman.

Two men, whose ages and names were not immediately available, inside the BMW were pronounced dead at the scene.

The police sergeant was taken to Mount Sinai Hospital with non-life-threatening injuries, Greer said.

The Cook County medical examiner’s office confirmed the two deaths.

At the crash scene, bricks were missing from the northeast corner and from the north side of the building into which the car crashed. The crushed black BMW was nearby, and about 200 feet to the northeast a Chevy Tahoe SUV, mangled at the front, sat in the middle of Ogden Avenue.

Debris from the crash littered the Ogden and Pulaski intersection, which police blocked off with yellow and red police tape for several hours.

Small pieces of a smashed fire hydrant lay on the southeast corner of the intersection.

Sanchez said that as soon as he realized the car crashed into the building, he and the other worker turned off the gas line in the restaurant.

“The grill was on and everything,” Sanchez said. “It could have been a lot worse.”

Sanchez said the landowner of the space where Sanchez Tacos is located has insurance and should be able to fix the building. But it was unclear how long the repairs would take.

More than  three weeks ago, Sanchez recalled watching an unoccupied building on the same block go up in flames, worrying that the blaze would affect his family’s restaurant, which has been around for about 10 years.

The extra-alarm fire started early Sept. 23 and destroyed the two-story commercial building, which housed a banquet hall on the second floor and a recording studio on the first floor, according to Chicago Fire Department officials.

Watching the crash scene spread out before him early Sunday morning, Sanchez and some of his family members were shaking heads in disbelief. 

“It’s crazy,” Sanchez said.

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