Making a bad situation much, much worse

On the way back from lunch, David and I witnessed a car accident. We were crossing 23rd Street when we saw a taxi creep around the traffic stopped at the light and into the lane going the opposite way. As I was commenting to David, "huh, what's this idiot doing?" a police car pulled up behind the stopped traffic, noticed where the taxi was, and flipped on her lights.

As soon as the pedestrians cleared the crosswalk, the taxi ran the red into the intersection and attempted to do a U-turn back around onto 23rd Street to head back the way he came. Halfway through the U-turn, he noticed the cop pulling out into the oncoming traffic lane, basically right where the taxi driver wanted to go.

Panicking because of the cop, the cabbie aborts the U-turn and instead turns left down Broadway. The cop put on her siren and pulled into the intersection to follow the taxi. The taxi driver knows he's screwed at this point and crosses all the way across Broadway (3-4 lanes of traffic) to try and make a hasty right turn down 22nd Street to lose the cop. But he doesn't see the delivery truck speeding to make the light at 23rd and the truck slams into the side of the cab about halfway down the block.

Everyone seemed to be more or less ok, but as David said shortly after the crash, "that guy just lost his job."