Stolen Lamborghini Huracan Split in Two at 113 mph, and the LAPD Pursuit Review Still Has No Public Finding

The public record of Elliott Dugan’s death has two clocks, and they do not match. Body-camera timestamps released by the Los Angeles Police Department put first contact with a gray 2019 Lamborghini Huracan at about 5:08 a.m. on April 6, 2024, at Sherman Way and Reseda Boulevard, and wreckage on the pavement by about 5:11 a.m. A department newsroom item posted on September 18, 2024, under the heading “Pursuit of a Stolen Vehicle Results in Crash,” tells the same geography and then says the stop happened “at around 5:10 p.m.” Twelve hours is not a rounding error. It is the kind of mistake that survives when a fatal chase becomes a video clip and then stops being anyone’s public assignment.

What the footage actually shows is short and ugly. West Valley officers traveling west in the 18500 block of Sherman Way pulled up beside the Huracan at a red light and saw the driver slumped, asleep or close to it. They repositioned behind the car. When the light changed they lit him up. Dugan, 51, of Los Angeles, said the supercar was a rental. A records check came back stolen, and it came back with multiple felony warrants on him. Officers ordered him out. He argued that they had not given him a reason. When an officer said he was being detained, he put the car in gear and ran west.

The pursuit was not a long San Fernando Valley epic. Investigators later put the top speed at about 113 mph. A few blocks west, near Vanalden Avenue, Dugan lost the car. The Huracan, worth on the order of $250,000 before it was stolen, hit the center median hard enough to tear into two main sections, rip out trees, and throw him from the cabin. Los Angeles Fire Department paramedics found him on a sidewalk by an apartment building, several hundred feet from the core of the wreck, and pronounced him dead. No bystander was listed as injured. Parked cars along Sherman Way took metal through roofs and windows. The street at dawn looked like a parts yard.

Three minutes is a policy question, not a highlight reel

Capt. Kelly Muniz said at the time that a pursuit investigation would be reviewed for adherence to the law and department policy, that it would take months, and that Traffic Group detectives wanted any additional witnesses. KABC-TV published the department video. The official package remains on the Los Angeles Police Department YouTube channel, titled as West Valley traffic collision investigation M24-03. The September 18, 2024 bulletin still reads like a status update from the week of the crash: the Multi-Disciplinary Collision Investigation Team is investigating, the driver was “Elliot Dugan” in that spelling, and the pursuit review will happen. It does not say what the review found. Through 2025 and into the fall of 2026, no widely reported public finding said the chase violated policy, and none said it cleared every decision either.

That silence is the story that outlived the wreck. Los Angeles has rewritten chase rules more than once after bystanders died. Those rewrites followed cases with names the city could not ignore: people waiting at bus stops, people in other cars, people who never stole anything. This file is the other kind. A wanted driver. A reported-stolen supercar. A wide Valley arterial before the morning rush. No listed civilian casualties. Those files often disappear into internal review without a second press conference, because the political cost of silence is low when the only person who died was the person who ran.

The cost is not zero. Sherman Way at 5 a.m. is lined with apartments, small lots, and cars that belong to people getting ready for a shift. A 113 mph run on that pavement is not a victimless stunt because the injury list happened to be empty. Trees came out of the median. An apartment sidewalk became a death scene. Luck is not a pursuit policy. The fact that the department’s own bulletin cannot decide whether the crash was in the morning or the evening is a smaller version of the same problem: once the video has been posted, the paperwork can be wrong and still sit online as the official account.

What a closed medical file still owes the block

On camera Dugan said he had been at “my lady’s house.” That line does not explain the warrants, the stolen-vehicle return, or the decision to floor a Huracan on Sherman Way. It does explain why the stop looked ordinary until it was not. Officers found a man asleep at a light. Three minutes later they had a fatality investigation, a car with no middle, and a sidewalk that smelled like burned composites. Departments justify chasing exactly this profile: a reported-stolen performance car and a driver who is already wanted. That profile is also the one that produces a wreck before the second radio update is finished. Speed, not the brand on the nose, is what split the chassis. A family sedan at 113 mph on the same median would have been a different video and the same physics.

The AEGIS Alliance files high-speed deaths under crime news and under police accountability news, because the question is not only who stole the car. It is how the chase was run, who reviews it, and whether anyone outside the department ever sees the conclusion. Other force-and-flight files on this site, including officers who put a surfer in a chokehold over a beach pass and an Atlanta officer ordered to pay $21 million after a man was paralyzed, turn on the same point: video is not a finding. A finding says whether the tactics matched the rules the city claims to use. More of that reporting is in U.S. news.

Dugan is not a pending defendant. He is a closed medical-examiner file attached to a car that no longer has a middle. The parked cars on Sherman Way took the shrapnel. Residents who found pieces in their sheet metal were asked, in May 2024, to call Traffic Group if they had more information. They were not handed a public summary of what the pursuit review concluded. If that review was finished, it has not been released in any form that corrected the bulletin, explained the 113 mph call, or said whether supervisors should have shut the chase down in the first block. Until someone with a civilian-facing job does that, the official story ends where the chassis split. That is convenient for a department and useless for the people who live on the block and woke up to yellow tape.

Stolen performance cars make easy video and lazy lessons. The useful lesson is narrower. A sleeping driver, a stolen Lamborghini, felony warrants, 113 mph, and three minutes is the whole case the public has been given. The department spelled his first name two ways, timed the crash on two clocks, and then left the policy question in a file that still reads as if the review has not started. The Huracan cannot be reassembled. The bulletin can.