Garrett Mitchell, The Republic
11:07 p.m. MST October 18, 2015
A family of five, including three young children, are dead after their vehicle crashed into Tempe Town Lake early Sunday, Tempe police said.
While details of what led to the vehicle plunging into the lake were unclear Sunday afternoon, police said all five occupants of the vehicle drowned.
Tempe police were alerted to the scene near the north end of the Scottsdale Road bridge at 12:15 a.m. Sunday. There, they found a silver SUV submerged in water and upside-down. The driver, identified as Glenn Edward Baxter, 27; his wife, Danica, 25; and two of their children, son Nazyiah, 2, and daughter Zariyah, 1, were pulled out of the murky depths by police and witnesses who were unaware of another occupant inside.
Rescuers performed CPR until paramedics arrived to transport the four unconscious occupants to the hospital, where all were later pronounced dead, said Tempe police spokesman Lt. Michael Pooley.
During the initial investigation, police identified Danica Baxter and discovered her 3-year-old son, Reighn, was unaccounted for. Just before 9 a.m., divers discovered the 3-year-old still strapped to his car seat in the back row of the submerged vehicle, in what police described as a "horrible" scene.
The family resided in Phoenix.
Witnesses across the lake on the south side reported seeing the vehicle with its headlights on at the embankment. They said they later heard the crash and saw the vehicle flipped upside-down in the dark water.
Pooley said investigators did not yet know if Baxter intentionally drove over the embankment. The speed of the vehicle at the time of the incident was also being determined, he said.
"This is a very horrific thing. ... It touches all of us," Pooley said. "We don't know exactly what happened. We don't know what led the driver to do this."
Authorities remained at the scene throughout Sunday morning trying to determine how or why the car ended up in the lake.
http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/tempe/breaking/2015/10/18/four-people-car-pulled-tempe-town-lake/74173500/
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