A 25-year-old man heading home from a friend’s graduation celebration never made it back to Wheaton after a drunken, unlicensed driver plowed into his Uber as they sat stopped in traffic on the Eisenhower Expressway, prosecutors said.
Benjamin Farraday and two friends who were in the rideshare with him had spent the evening of May 16 celebrating in Chicago before ordering an Uber for the trip home, officials said. As they traveled west on the Ike, traffic backed up near Ashland Avenue, forcing all traffic to merge into the far-right lane. Prosecutors said the Uber had been completely stopped for about a minute, with the driver’s foot on the brake, when a GMC Yukon driven by 21-year-old Jose Perez Marin slammed into it from behind.
The impact launched the Uber into a Buick ahead of it, which was then pushed into a Jeep, prosecutors said. Data recovered from the Yukon allegedly showed it was traveling 65 mph moments before the crash. The vehicle’s brakes were applied just a half-second before impact, reducing its speed to about 45 mph at the moment of collision, according to prosecutors…