WASHINGTON — A Maryland man reported missing over the weekend was discovered Monday morning down an embankment off Indian Head Highway in Oxon Hill, Maryland, near his crashed vehicle, Maryland State Police said.
The man was discovered shortly before 8 a.m. after highway road crews noticed a damaged guardrail on Indian Head (Maryland Route 210) near Interstate 495, according to state police.
The man, who appeared to have suffered only minor injuries, told firefighters he had crashed late Friday night, said Alan Doubleday, assistant fire chief of the Prince George’s County Fire and EMS Department.
“The only thing I know was that it was cold last night. And there was all the rain,” Doubleday said. “I couldn’t imagine being stuck out there through the heat of all day Saturday and the cold of all night last night.”
The driver was taken to Prince George’s Hospital as a precaution, authorities said.
The man was lying in the ravine when police and firefighters and police arrived. But Doubleday said it’s not clear, given the nature of the man’s injuries, why he didn’t walk away from the crash and flag down help himself.
“It’s difficult to understand why the individual may have been out there since Friday night if he was able to walk out on his own,” Doubleday said. “But that’s why we took him to a trauma center, just to make sure there wasn’t some hidden damage, some hidden injuries that we couldn’t obviously see from the outside.”
State police said that they are still investigating the crash and that it’s unclear when exactly the crash occurred, but that the driver’s family had reported the man missing on Saturday.
State highway contractors were in the area early Monday morning to pick up a sofa that had been reported dumped on the side of the road, Doubleday said, when they noticed the damaged guardrail and the vehicle lying in the ravine at the bottom of the embankment.
The ramp from northbound Maryland Route 210 to the Outer Loop of the Beltway was closed for part of Monday morning during the recovery effort, state police said.
WTOP’s Kristi King contributed to this report.
