POLICE SEEK CAUSE OF FIVE-VEHICLE ACCIDENT

A man involved in a five-car accident in the Wal-Mart Supercenter parking lot Tuesday night was at St. Francis Medical Center with a broken neck.

Cape Girardeau police Ptlmn. Kevin Eudy said Lynn M. Twitty, 87, of Cape Girardeau rammed three vehicles and clipped the building with the car he was driving before finally coming to rest after hitting a pickup truck. That impact sent the truck over the edge of a 30-foot drainage ditch.

Police were trying to determine the cause of the accidents.

Eudy said Twitty's car was parked nose-to-nose with a car in a center parking lane near the north entrance to the store. Twitty reportedly drove his car into that car, owned by Sena Odom of Scott City, and pushed it back into the driving lane. He then allegedly hit it again as he tried to pull around it, and then drove up the lane toward the store.

Twitty reportedly came out of that lane and hit a car driven by Mary Puls of Jackson. That spun Puls' car around, and it came to rest with its rear tires on the curb and its trunk just inches from the store.

"I was just coming in," Puls said. "He came up from the wrong way and just laid into us."

After hitting Puls' car Twitty's vehicle continued on and clipped the building before hitting head-on a parked car owned by Wal-Mart associate Ginger Wood.

Twitty reportedly backed up from that impact and drove forward again heading east through the parking lanes and struck the pickup, which went over a curb and slid to the bottom of a drainage ditch.

Rescue workers had to pry off the driver's side doors of both the pickup and Twitty's car to extract the drivers. The driver of the pickup, Jim Eaker, and his wife, Patsy Jean Eaker, a passenger, were taken to St. Francis Medical Center with minor injuries.

A St. Francis spokesperson said Twitty was in serious but stable condition and was admitted to the intensive-care unit of the medical center.