Authorities estimate the car was traveling faster than 150 mph, when the driver lost control and smashed into a utility pole.
By Hans Laetz / Special to The Malibu Times
Feb. 23 Web update
Investigators say they plan to again question a millionaire Swedish playboy who says he cannot remember how his $1.2 million Enzo Ferrari was destroyed in a Tuesday morning crash on Pacific Coast Highway.
Stefan Eriksson, a 44-year-old Bel-Air resident who allegedly was convicted of racketeering and counterfeiting in his native Sweden 12 years ago, was found legally drunk and bleeding next to the scattered wreckage of the Ferrari early Tuesday morning on Pacific Coast Highway near Decker Canyon Road.
Eriksson was photographed by The Malibu Times with blood on his mouth, and both air bags had deployed in the Ferrari. However, deputies said only the driver-side airbag had blood on it.
Eriksson had designed a car-racing game for a British-American electronic game manufacturing company that lavished pay and exotic cars on him. That company, Gizmondo, is being liquidated in Britain this week after what newspapers there call a spectacular collapse. Eriksson has resigned from the company just before its launch last fall, and days before a Swedish newspaper reported the counterfeiting conviction.
And ABC News is reporting that the Bank of Scotland was trying to repossess Eriksson’s Enzo.
Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputies estimate the car was going faster than 150 mph – perhaps topping 200 – when it began swerving on the highway at 6:06 a.m.
The car went 20 feet up an embankment, smashing into a power pole, before ending up on the highway and shattering into pieces over more than 400 yards. The engine came to a rest in the center of the road, and the passenger compartment continued spinning another 50 yards down the shoulder. The car was severed in half.
“It sounded like a huge lumber truck or something lost its load and started scraping down the highway,” said one highway resident, standing in his driveway surveying the scene. “Stuff was falling everywhere.”
Deputies who arrived at the scene said neither of the two men would admit to driving the two-seat car.
“They both said somebody else had been driving the car, and that this driver had run up into the hills,” said Sheriff’s Sgt. Peter Charboneau.
A helicopter and several firefighters and deputies searched the area, but found no one.
Other deputies said Eriksson was the registered owner of the expensive exotic vehicle. He claimed he had allowed a friend, whose name he could not recall, to take the wheel of the car, officers said.
Witnesses had seen the red car, estimated to be worth anywhere between $600,000 and $1.2 million, speeding through Trancas just before the wreck, deputies said. The two men questioned in the case, however, said the driver of the Ferrari had been racing another car, which allegedly left the scene.
Eriksson admitted to a reporter that he been in it, and had a cut lip from the air bag. The man smelled of alcohol and told a reporter he did not remember what happened.
“At this point we can’t place either of them in the driver’s seat, and unless another witness or somebody turns something else up, we can’t charge them,” Charboneau said.
The sergeant said both men admitted to deputies they were drinking alcohol before the dawn accident.
“We cannot charge someone without either a witness, or circumstances that put him behind the wheel of the car that eliminate the possibility that anyone else was there,” he said.
Dangling power lines and hundreds of pieces of fiberglass and metal meant Pacific Coast Highway was closed to morning commuters for two hours. Southbound traffic backed up more than a mile.
A high-voltage distribution line feeding Decker Canyon and the La Chusa area was destroyed, putting 1,475 homes in the dark temporarily. By midmorning, power had been restored to all but 75 houses in Decker Canyon, Southern California Edison spokesman Tom Boyd said.