Three people were hurt and traffic was snarled Wednesday night after a state trooper collided with another driver at the intersection of Highway 20 and Whidbey Avenue in Oak Harbor.

The crash, which happened just after 6 p.m., left parts of both roads blocked for hours.

Trooper Andrew Kincaid, 21, was heading north on the highway in a marked Washington State Patrol Ford Explorer. He turned left at the intersection onto Whidbey Avenue.

That’s when he was struck by a 78-year-old Oak Harbor man driving south on the highway in a Toyota pickup truck, according to a collision press memo issued by the state patrol.

The Oak Harbor man and his 77-year-old wife were both injured and treated at the scene. The trooper’s family drove him to the hospital.

Drugs or alcohol were not involved, but the state patrol’s memo doesn’t indicate the cause.

Melissa Alexander and 2-year-old son were doing of one his favorite activities — watching the traffic zoom by from his bedroom window — when the crash occurred. They live in a second story apartment near the intersection and saw what happened.

The trooper tried to flip around in the intersection and didn’t see the other driver coming, she said.

“The trooper just turned his lights on and didn’t even slow down in the intersection,” she said. “It was like he was the only car out and about.”

Then she watched two more troopers show up and do the same maneuver, “but luckily others were able to stop in time.”

She said she tried to give the officers a statement but they didn’t want it.

“They told us to head home — we were not on the road,” she said.

The investigation to determine the cause could take several weeks, according to a spokesperson with the Washington State Patrol. A detective with the agency is investigating because the collision involved a trooper.