RAW: Michael Hastings Car Crash

Recently released surveillance footage showing Michael Hastings fatal car accident. Michael Hastings died in a single-vehicle automobile crash in his Mercedes C250 Coupé at approximately 4:25 a.m. in the Hancock Park neighborhood of Los Angeles on June 18, 2013. A witness to the crash said the car seemed to be traveling at maximum speed and was creating sparks and flames before it fishtailed and crashed into a palm tree. Video from a nearby security camera shows Hastings' vehicle speeding and bursting into flames after crashing. Witnesses described the car's engine being ejected 50 to 60 yards from the scene. Michael Mahon Hastings (January 28, 1980 – June 18, 2013) was an American journalist, author, contributing editor to Rolling Stone, and reporter for BuzzFeed. He was raised in New York, Canada, and Vermont, and attended New York University. Hastings rose to prominence with his coverage of the Iraq War for Newsweek in the 2000s. After his fiancee, Andrea Parhamovich, was killed when her car was ambushed in Iraq, Hastings wrote his first book, I Lost My Love in Baghdad: A Modern War Story (2008), a memoir about his relationship with Parhamovich and the violent insurgency that took her life. He received the George Polk Award for "The Runaway General" (2010), a Rolling Stone profile of General Stanley McChrystal, commander of NATO's International Security Assistance Force in the Afghanistan war. The article documented the widespread contempt for civilian officials in the US government by the general and his staff and resulted in McChrystal's resignation. Hastings followed up with The Operators (2012), a detailed book account of his month-long stay with McChrystal in Europe and Afghanistan.