A 14-year-old boy has been killed and two other teenagers are fighting for life after a ute believed to have been stolen hit a tree in rural Victoria.
Police say the ute hit a tree on the Calder Highway, near Woosang-Yeungroon Road in Woosang, north-west of Melbourne, just before 10am.
The driver, 18, and another passenger, also 14, were found trapped and had to be cut from the vehicle and airlifted to hospital.
Police believe the vehicle was stolen overnight from nearby Mildura, where the teenagers were from.
Detective Sergeant Ashley Pendrick said the group was “heavily trapped” after the “high impact” crash.
“It took rescue workers some time to get them out of the vehicle, and yeah, it would have been really confronting for them to come across it this morning,” he said,
Police don’t know how fast the ute was travelling or how it lost control.
“We’re looking at everything, we will look at speed, we will look at the road conditions. We will look at the manner of driving,” he said.
There were no witnesses and the first notification police received about the crash was from the vehicle itself.
Pendrick warned young people to “know there’s consequences for their actions”.
“When you look at incidents like this that are totally devastating you just plead to those kids that they’re not playing games, there’s real consequences,” he said.
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