Actress Anne Heche was able to speak with some of the 59 firefighters who worked to free her using a crane after she smashed her Mini into a house at 90mph and caused a huge fire, allegedly while drink-driving.
Officials say Heche, 53, pranged her Mini Clubman on a block of garages in Los Angeles around 11am Friday, before speeding off at up to 90mph and plowing 30 feet into a home.
Despite the speed of the smash and the intensity of the ensuing blaze, Heche was still conscious and able to speak as she was pulled from the wreckage, Los Angeles Fire Department Captain Erik Scott told ABC 7 in the aftermath.
‘When we arrived on the scene, we had a solo vehicle that appeared to be driving at a high rate of speed on a perpendicular street and launched through the front yard into the home,’
Scott said Heche, a mom-of-two, was trapped in her car as the flames began to spread, but noted: ‘She was talking to us at the time that we were able to pull her out, so that’s a good sign.’
The actress, who once dated Ellen DeGeneres, was spotted on doorbell footage hammering down a residential street before she took out a hedge, slammed through a building, causing her car to explode on impact.
She is understood to have battled scorching heat in the burning vehicle for up to 30 minutes before 59 firefighters arrived to drag her to safety
Authorities then had to use a crane to pull Heche out from the flaming vehicle, a neighbor who witnessed the crash told NBC 4.
Aerial footage later showed her bursting through the straps in a white bag before writhing in pain on a stretcher as she was bundled into an ambulance and rushed to a local ICU.
A picture taken before her first crash also showed Heche with what appeared to be a bottle of vodka in the cup holder of her Mini ahead of the horrific second smash.
She is now in stable condition at a local hospital, where her ex, Thomas Jane, said she is ‘expected to pull through.’
Actress Anne Heche has been intubated in a critical condition after crashing her Mini into a garage before speeding off and smashing it into an apartment block where it exploded
A photo from earlier on Friday shows Heche moments before the second accident at the wheel with a bottle of vodka with a red cap plonked in the cup holder
The 53-year-old suffered horrific burns during the collision and was recorded being dragged out of the mangled wreck by firefighters after it burst into flames in LA around 11am
An interior shot shows the Mini Clubman’s airbag had blown out along with most of the decor being burnt through following the crash
Last night, Heche was said to be intubated and in a critical condition in an LA hospital having suffered horrific burns during the collision.
She was recorded being dragged out of the mangled wreck by firefighters after her car burst into flames mid-morning on Friday.
She could be seen writhing around on the stretcher before she was bundled into the back of an ambulance and rushed to a nearby intensive care unit.
Shocking images also show the burnt out wreckage of her Mini Clubman as it was towed out of a hedge across the road from a school in the Mar Vista area.
And video captured by a doorcam shows the vehicle owned by the actress speeding down a Mar Vista street moments before crashing into a home, sparking the blaze.
Heche had been driving her blue Mini Clubman in the Mar Vista area of Los Angeles when she careered into a garage of an apartment complex, after possibly hitting a curb.
Locals rushed to help the stricken actress with one man demanding she get out of the car. She ignored the advice and restarted the ignition, slammed her car into reverse and sped off down the road at speed.
Pictures and video showed her looking dazed at the wheel after the first crash, with a witness capturing her with a bottle with a red top on it in her car.
She later quickly veered off the road again, smashed through a hedge and and rammed into a nearby home in the 1800 block of South Walgrove Avenue.
The actress, who dated Ellen Degeneres before they split up, suffered severe burns and has been intubated but is expected to live following the horror crash
One resident estimated the car to have been traveling at close to 100mph. The video ends seconds later with a loud crash
The Los Angeles Fire Department said it took 59 firefighters 65 minutes to put out the ‘stubborn flames’ and ‘rescue one female adult found within the vehicle.’
‘The house was tons of smoke. I think they used the crane to move the car to extract the driver. It was crazy,’ an eyewitness told NBC Los Angeles.
Aerial footage showed her with brutal scarring across her back from the fire after her top appeared to have been shredded by the heat and she writhed across the stretcher in pain.
Firefighters were able to get the flames out within about an hour, according to Fox 11 but Heche suffered severe burns in the resulting blaze and is now in intensive care.
‘If there’s somebody alive in there this is going to be a miracle’ Fox 11 reporter Stu Mandel said as he watched from a helicopter hovering above the scene.
Jawdropping pictures from the scene showed the burnt out hull of the car as it was recovered from the hedge before being towed away by the authorities.
‘We really had a multifaceted incident here,’ LAFD Capt. Erik Scott said. ‘We had a significant traffic collision, we had entrapment of a woman inside that, we had car that erupted into fire, and then we had a home that had significant fire that is red tagged. It’s at this point destroyed.’
‘Her condition prevents doctors from performing any tests to determine if she was driving under the influence of alcohol,’ TMZ reported.
The LAFD also revealed how the vehicle had driven 30ft into the residence but that the occupant had escaped without injury.
The vehicle struck a two-story house ‘causing structural compromise and erupting in heavy fire.’ The building was left ‘uninhabitable’, spokesman Brian Humphrey added.
An overhead view shows the massive amounts of damage caused by the fiery car crash to Anne Heche’s Mini
Locals rushed to help the stricken actress but she immediately slammed her car into reverse and sped off down the road
Firefighters were able to get the flames out within about an hour, according to Fox 11 but Heche suffered severe burns in the resulting blaze and is now in intensive care
Firefighters survey the scene with Heche’s wrecked car in the middle of the picture
Heche had been driving her blue Mini Clubman in the Mar Vista area of Los Angeles when she careered into a garage of an apartment complex
Heche can be seen being removed from the scene on a stretcher and taken towards a waiting ambulance
DailyMail.com spoke exclusively with neighbor David Manpearl who caught the incident on his doorbell camera. His home office looks out to his yard on a residential street about five houses away from where Heche crashed.
He said: ‘At about 10:50am I heard a car go speeding by and looked out my window where I saw the car going about 90 miles an hour.
DailyMail.com spoke exclusively with neighbor David Manpearl who caught the incident on his doorbell camera
‘Within seconds I heard a loud crash at which point I ran outside in my flip flops because I knew someone was hurt and boy was I right.’
Manpearl who has lived in the family friendly neighborhood said he ran towards the intersection where the Mini had crashed into the home.
‘Before I approached the car, I saw the resident of the home standing barefoot in the debris. She was in shock and frantically asked me to help get her pets out of the house.
‘I was able to get the leashes for her two small dogs and escorted her out of the side of her house. She had her two dogs with her and a tortoise.’
Manpearl explained how he then went to the car to help the driver who was wedged inside between the airbag and the seat.
he said: ‘I tried speaking with her a few times asking if she was ok but she wasn’t responding so I had to get closer. I was able to open the back door of the car and crawled half-way inside.
‘This time when I asked her if she was ok, she said no.’ Manpearl asked Heche if she could raise her hand to see if she was ok and she said no and made some grunts.
That was when the hero neighbor felt water dripping on him only to realize another neighbor was squirting a hose at the car which had now caught on fire and was quickly spreading up the walls of the house.
He continued: ‘I tried to talk to her again and noticed it was getting smokey and the flames were now on my right and my left so I quickly made my way out of the car.’
The engineer made his way to the front of the house and attempted to put out the flames with another hose but realized it was useless because the whole house was ablaze. By now nearly ten fire trucks had arrived.
He said: ‘I was positive that the driver was dead. That she had burned up. It took at least 30 minutes for the fire department to douse the flames, extract the car and pull her out of the car.’
‘I was surprised to find out that it was Anne Heche. I think I knew she had had problems in the past.’
The owner of the house that was hit, with all her pets including a tortoise, spent the remainder of the day at Manpearl’s house and was in the garden when the car hit.
Neighbor Roy Morgen added that the homeowner ran inside his home for safety following the crash.
‘Luckily she didn’t get hurt and neither did her two dogs,’ Morgen told ABC 7. ‘She happened to be sitting with them.
‘She was just in the house with us o tell us that the dogs were sitting with her when the car came flying through, and the car stopped like two feet away from where she was sitting.’
The LAFD said her home is now destroyed.
Smoke can be seen billowing out of the roof of the home which the LA Fire Department say has been destroyed
Firefighters dampen down the remains of the blaze as they stand on the rooftop of the home
Smoke could be seen billowing from the home following the crash on Friday morning
The horrific crash caused the car to explode into flames before Heche was dragged away by firefighters and raced to hospital in an ambulance
Firefighters were able to get the flames out within about an hour, according to Fox 11 but Heche suffered severe burns in the resulting blaze and is now in intensive care
Pictures and video showed her looking dazed at the wheel after the first crash, with a witness capturing her with a bottle with a red top on it in her car. It is not clear what was in the container but it looked like a vodka bottle
Heche is now said to be ‘stable’ following the fiery crash.
She is ‘expected to pull through’ but remains intubated in hospital following the horror crash in Mar Vista on Friday morning, her ex-boyfriend Thomas Jane has told DailyMail.com.
Jane, 53, also paid an emotional tribute to her, saying despite the fact they are no longer together he offers her his ‘thoughts and prayers’ and credited her ‘one of the true talents of her generation’.
Heche is a mother to two sons – Homer, with cameraman ex-husband Coleman Luffoon, as well as Atlas, who she had with former boyfriend James Tupper.
Jane, who dated in 2019 and 2020 and worked together on the HBO series Hung, told DailyMail.com: ‘While Anne and I are no longer an item, todays tragic news was devastating to me and to all who love her.
‘My heart goes out to Anne and her two sons. As of right now Anne is stable and expected to pull through. My thoughts and prayers are with Anne, one of the true talents of her generation. Thank God no one else was hurt.’
The couple dated as recently as 2020 and had even bought a house together. They had known each other for more than a decade and had co-starred as an acrimoniously divorced couple in Hung from 2009 to 2011.
The pair first became friends a decade ago when they played exes on the HBO series Hung for two years. They are pictured here in February of 2020 when they were officially a couple
The actress, 53, (left) is the former partner of talk show host Ellen DeGeneres, and is known for films including Donnie Brasco, Cedar Rapids, and a remake of Psycho
Heche is pictured with former partner James Tupper, left, in 2012. The couple had had a son together named Atlas, pictured in stripes. Heche also had a son with called Homer with cameraman ex-husband Coleman Laffoon. Homer is pictured front row in blue.
Heche is pictured with Harrison Ford in 1998 movie Six Days Seven Nights, her biggest role to date
Kiss kiss: The two looked happy as can be as they were photographed at the Hollywood China Night Oscar viewing party in February 2020, but the pair are no longer together
Heche, a native of Aurora, Ohio, most recently starred in the action pic 13 Minutes,’in which she starred alongside Thora Birch, Amy Smart and Will Peltz.
She went through a very public divorce in January 2018 from her ex-husband James Tupper. The couple were together for 10 years and share a son, Atlas, 13.
She was well known for her romance with DeGeneres in the 1990s. She brought the talk show host to the premiere of her movie Volcano in 1997. She claimed the act saw her being ‘blacklisted’ from Hollywood.
‘I didn’t do a studio picture for 10 years,’ she told Page Six. ‘I was fired from a $10 million picture deal and did not see the light of day in a studio picture.’
Following her and Ellen’s breakup, she was found incoherent and babbling in the California desert. She stumbled into a stranger’s home before being carted off to a hospital – hours after breaking up with the comedian.
‘I was told to go to a place where I would meet a spaceship. I was told in order to get on the spaceship that I would have to take a hit of ecstasy,’ Heche explained.
‘Fresno was the culmination of a journey and a world that I thought I needed to escape to in order to find love.’
Shortly after the couple dated, the director tied the knot to Coley Laffoon. They also share 20-year-old son Homer Laffoon.
Heche’s divorce from the cameraman was finalized in 2009, two years after they initially ended their romance. The blonde later started dating Men In Trees co-star James Tupper in 2007, before they split in 2018.
Heche shares son Atlas with her ex James Tupper.
There was plenty of emergency services in attendance in the aftermath of the crash
Heche could be seen, arms flailing, as she was placed into the back of an ambulance
Heche’s vehicle crashed into a home setting it ablaze
This is the Mar vista home which Anne Heche crashed her car into engulfed the house and her mini, Anne was reportedly severely burned and taken away by ambulance
Media crews can be seen filming outside of the home where the accident occurred
Onlookers try to catch a glimpse of the carnage as they pass by the site of the accident on Friday
The properly has been ‘destroyed’ according to the LAFD and has been cordoned off
Fire crews were on scene as they attempted to put out the flames which took about an hour
Smoke could be seen coming from the home into which Heche has crashed ino
EMTs quickly ushered Heche into the back of an ambulance
The home into which Heche crashed into suffered significant fire damage with much of its roof destroyed
More recently, Heche had been involved with fellow actor Thomas Jane. The pair had co-starred as an acrimoniously divorced couple in the provocatively named 2009-2011 HBO series Hung.
At the time, they were both involved with other people. She with James Tupper and he with Patricia Arquette.
Almost a decade later, the pair worked alongside each other once more as they portray a married couple in the Netflix indie thriller The Vanished.
In late 2019, the pair went public with their romance, although they are not together anymore. Heche has also previously been open about her battles with substance abuse.
‘I drank. I smoked. I did drugs. I had sex with people. I did anything I could to get the shame out of my life,’ she told ABC News in 2001.
Horrified witnesses watch on as the car is towed out of the garden following the horrendous crash on Friday morning in LA
One clasps her hands to her mouth as she watches the carnage unfold in front of her following the explosion near a school
The apartment complex with adjoining garage is pictured following the crash on Friday morning in Los Angeles
The interior of the home which was struck appeared to be an almighty mess following the blaze
A warning sign tells people not to venture inside the home which was badly damaged by fire on Friday morning
Firefighters are seen outside the home after the flames were put out
She said her choices were because of a painful childhood in which she was sexually abused by her father, Donald Heche.
‘I’m not crazy, but it’s a crazy life. I was raised in a crazy family and it took 31 years to get the crazy out of me.
‘I had a fantasy world that I escaped to. I called my other personality Celestia. I believed I was from that world. I believed I was from another planet. I think I was insane.’
‘He raped me, he stuck his d**k in my mouth, he fondled me, he put me on all fours, and had sex with me,’ Heche said of the abuse by her father.
‘I think it’s always hard for children to talk about abuse because it is only memory. I didn’t carry around a tape recorder … I didn’t chisel anything in stone.
‘Anybody can look and say, ‘Well how do you know for sure?’ And that’s one of the most painful things about it. You don’t,’ Heche said in the 2001 interview.
Heche also revealed that she had herpes as a young girl, but did not know if her mother knew she was being molested by her father. ‘I had a rash, I had sores, I had welts on my nose and on my lips.’
She said she does not describe herself as straight, gay or bisexual. ‘I would never limit myself to saying I would be with a man or a woman,’ she said.
Anne Heche and Ami Goodheart are pictured attending the 24th Costume Designers Guild Awards at The Eli and Edythe Broad Stage in March 2022 in Santa Monica, California
It is believed Heche was back to dating women once again. Last month she shared photos with fashion designer Ami Goodheart
Ami Goodheart with Anne Heche in a May 8, 2022 photo from her Instagram page. Caption reads: #11oclocklive @anneheche every day see you here
Their exes: On the left is Thomas and Patricia Arquette in 2005. And on the right is Anne with James Tupper in 2009
Heche noted how her relationship with DeGeneres ‘wasn’t a long-term love affair;’ the two were snapped in 2000
Anne Heche and James Tupper are pictured together in 2009 in Los Angeles, left. Tupper and Heche are pictured together in 2017, right
Anne Heche’s hour of horror: How star ‘drunkenly crashed into garage, sped away at 90mph’, plowed through an LA house and spent 30 minutes in a burning car before being rescued
Actress Anne Heche was involved in two car crashes minutes apart in Los Angeles on Friday. The second crash caused a fire that destroyed the house.
As a result of the blaze, Heche, who is best known for her relationship with Ellen DeGeneres and her acting roles in the 1990s, was taken to a local hospital and intubated.
Heche first crashed her car into an apartment building in Los Angeles on Friday morning around 11:00 am, she fled that scene and continued driving on the same block before crashing into another home.
At the scene of the first crash, residents of the apartment building attempted to free Heche from the car. The star resisted, putting her car in reverse and speeding off.
The TMZ report mentions that photos from the time of the first crash show that Heche may have had a bottle of ‘alcohol’ in the cup holder. In June 2021, Heche said on an episode of her podcast ‘Better Together’ that she is sober.
Following the initial crash, Heche’s blue Mini Cooper is shown on a doorbell camera speeding past a home along South Walgrove Avenue in the Mar Vista neighborhood around 90 miles per hour.
Minutes later Heche crashed into a two-story home along the same street causing the house and Heche’s car to become engulfed in flames.
The home is located around 15 miles from Heche’s home in the Eastern Columbia Lofts building in the Broadway Theater District of Downtown Los Angeles.
According to the Los Angeles Fire Department, the crash caused ‘structural compromise and erupting in heavy fire.’
In a tweet, the LAFD said that it took 59 firefighters 65 minutes to put out the blaze. The home is now ‘uninhabitable.’ The owner of the home was unharmed as they were in the backyard when Heche careered into the front of the building.
Pictures and video showed her looking dazed at the wheel after the first crash, with a witness capturing her with a bottle with a red top on it in her car. It is not clear what was in the container but it looked like a vodka bottle
An earlier shot also shows Heche moments before the second accident at the wheel with a bottle of vodka with a red cap plonked in the cup holder
In a report from the scene prior to Heche’s extraction around 11:30 am, Fox 11’s Stu Mandel said: ‘If there’s somebody alive in there this is going to be a miracle.’ Minutes later, Heche can be seen being carried from the scene.
A witness told NBC Los Angeles that a crane was used to extract Heche from her car.
Los Angeles Fire Department Capt. Erik Scott told the media: ‘We really had a multifaceted incident here. We had a significant traffic collision, we had entrapment of a woman inside that, we had a car that erupted into fire, and then we had a home that had significant fire that is red tagged. It’s at this point destroyed.’
The ‘Six Days, Seven Nights’ star was rushed to a local hospital. At the time of writing, she is listed as being in critical condition as she is being treated for burns. Heche is expected to survive
According to TMZ, Heche was behaving erratically.
Video from the scene shows Heche being carried away with burned clothes and covered in a white sheet. At one point, Heche sits up on the stretcher and gesticulates with the firefighters while seemingly trying to escape.
Burn victims are regularly wrapped in a sterile sheet doused in sterile water to cool the wounds.
An overhead view shows the massive amounts of damage caused by the fiery car crash to Anne Heche’s Mini
Smoke can be seen billowing out of the roof of the home which the LA Fire Department say has been destroyed
Shocking images also show the burnt out wreckage of her Mini Clubman as it was towed out of a hedge across the road from a school in the Mar Vista area
The incident occurred in the Mar Vista-section of Los Angeles. There were no other injuries as a result of the crash.
Speaking to the Los Angeles Times, a law enforcement source said that Heche was ‘deemed to be under the influence and acting erratically.’
‘Her condition prevents doctors from performing any tests to determine if she was driving under the influence of alcohol,’ TMZ reported.
DailyMail.com spoke exclusively with neighbor David Manpearl who caught the incident on his doorbell camera.
Manpearl’s home office looks out to his front yard on a quiet residential street about five houses away from where Heche plowed into a home.
‘At about 10:50am I heard a car go speeding by and looked out my window where I saw the car going about 90 miles an hour. Within seconds I heard a loud crash at which point I ran outside in my flip flops because I knew someone was hurt and boy was I right.’
Manpearl who has lived in the family friendly neighborhood said he ran towards the intersection where the Mini had crashed into the home.
An interior shot shows the Mini Clubman’s airbag had blown out along with most of the decor being burnt through following the crash
Heche can be seen being removed from the scene on a stretcher and taken towards a waiting ambulance
‘Before I approached the car, I saw the resident of the home standing barefoot in the debris. She was in shock and frantically asked me to help get her pets out of the house. I was able to get the leashes for her two small dogs and escorted her out of the side of her house. She had her two dogs with her and a tortoise.’
Manpearl explained how he then went to the car to help the driver who was wedged inside between the airbag and the seat.
‘I tried speaking with her a few times asking if she was ok but she wasn’t responding so I had to get closer. I was able to open the back door of the car and crawled half-way inside. This time when I asked her if she was ok, she said no.’
Manpearl asked Heche if she could raise her hand to see if she was ok and she said no and made some grunts. That’s when the hero neighbor felt water dripping on him only to realize another neighbor was squirting a hose at the car which had now caught on fire and was quickly spreading up the walls of the house.
‘I tried to talk to her again and noticed it was getting smokey and the flames were now on my right and my left so I quickly made my way out of the car.’
The engineer made his way to the front of the house and attempted to put out the flames with another hose but realized it was useless because the whole house was ablaze.
Heche arrives for the premiere of Netflix’s ‘The Unforgivable’ at the Directors Guild of America in Los Angeles in December 2021
Heche and long-timer partner Ellen DeGeneres pictured together in 2000
By now nearly ten fire trucks had arrived on the scene.
‘I was positive that the driver was dead. That she had burned up. It took at least 30 minutes for the fire department to douse the flames, extract the car and pull her out of the car.’
‘I was surprised to find out that it was Anne Heche. I think I knew she had had problems in the past.’
The owner of the home, together with all her pets, tortoise included, spent the remainder of the day at Manpearl’s house where neighbors brought her food and clothes. The LAFD said her whole house is now destroyed.
The 53-year-old actress is best known for her roles in hit movies from the 1990s such as ‘Volcano’, ‘Donnie Brasco’ and ‘I Know What You Did Last Summer.’ In her early career, Heche won a Daytime Emmy Award for her role on the soap opera ‘Another World.’
Heche long claimed that she was blacklisted from Hollywood following her lesbian relationship with Elle DeGeneres. The couple dated between 1997 and 2000.
Following that relationship, Heche married James Tupper and had a son together named Atlas.
In a 2021 interview, Heche said that she was ‘patient zero’ of cancel culture.
In 2000, Heche was arrested after she went on to someone else’s property in Fresno wearing in her bra, California. This led to her being hospitalized.
A witness said that time: ‘She proceeded to tell me that she was God and was going to take everyone back to heaven with her in some sort of spaceship.’
In her 2001 memoir ‘Call Me Crazy,’ Heche wrote that that at one point of her life: ‘I believed I was from another planet. I think I was instane.’
Heche, a native of Aurora,, most recently starred in the action pic 13 Minutes,’in which she starred alongside Thora Birch, Amy Smart and Will Peltz.