Nine injured in Northridge crash; two freed from wreckage and taken to hospital critical

Two people had to be freed from wreckage before paramedics could take them to a hospital in critical condition after a multi-vehicle crash in Northridge on Sunday, Oct. 25. They were among nine people injured in the collision on North Reseda Boulevard near Lassen Street. Five patients went to hospitals altogether; four others declined hospital transport. ^{2 3}

The two trapped occupants were in critical condition when they were transported. No later medical update has been established, so that description should not be read as a fresh assessment of how they are doing now. The conditions of the three other hospitalized patients were not specified. ^{2 3}

The Los Angeles Police Department is investigating what caused the vehicles to collide, CBS Los Angeles reported. The available information establishes the rescue and the patient count, but not the sequence of events that led to the crash. ²

The fire department recorded the collision in the 9900 block of North Reseda Boulevard in Los Angeles’s Northridge neighborhood at 10:12 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time on Oct. 25, 2026. CBS placed it at around 10:10 a.m. and identified Lassen Street as the nearby cross street. Those times describe the same Sunday-morning incident: one is an official incident time, the other an approximation. ^{2 3}

Arriving firefighters found two occupants trapped in the collision wreckage and extricated both. Paramedics then took them to a nearby hospital. The fire department’s updated account records five hospital transports by its paramedics, including those two critical patients. CBS reported that the three other patients were taken to nearby hospitals in unknown condition. ^{2 3}

An earlier fire department alert, preserved in a reproduction by Forth, counted five patients. The department’s subsequent update raised the total to nine. That is a revised accounting of the same incident, not evidence of a separate crash or a second group of nine patients. The updated official total supersedes the earlier count. ^{11 3}

The two appearances of the number five can be confusing. In the earlier alert, five was the total patient count then reported. In the update, five was the number taken to hospitals out of a larger total of nine. The final accounting is two critical patients and three other patients transported, plus four who declined hospital transport. ^{11 3}

Those four remain part of the injury total. Declining an ambulance trip does not establish that someone was uninjured, and the available account does not say they were medically cleared. Equally, the absence of a specified condition for the three other hospitalized patients is not a basis for assigning them either minor or serious injuries. ^{2 3}

The number of people injured is firmer than the number of vehicles involved. The fire department described a multi-vehicle collision without giving an exact vehicle count. CBS reported that video posted to the Citizen app showed as many as five cars involved. That remains a video-based estimate, not a confirmed departmental count. ^{2 3}

The original Citizen video has not been independently verified for this account. Its reported contents should therefore stay attributed to CBS rather than be presented as a separate eyewitness finding. The distinction matters: an estimate of cars visible in footage does not settle the official number involved in a collision. ²

The fire department’s record identifies its response as incident 0614 and also lists LAPD incident 1554. Those identifiers tie the emergency response to this crash; they do not explain its cause. No incident-specific police finding establishing how the collision happened is available in the evidence reviewed. ³

A later CBS video-page headline also described two people as critically injured, but supplied no additional patient information. It does not establish that doctors had reassessed their conditions after transport. There is likewise no verified official closure or reopening notice for this incident in the available information. ^{1 3}

The clearest account remains the human one: nine people were injured, five needed hospital transport, and two could not leave the wreckage without firefighters’ help. What happened afterward to those hospitalized—and what set the collision in motion—remains unresolved. ^{2 3}