BANGOR – Police on Sunday were trying to learn the cause of a car crash that killed a Glenburn teen-ager and left what a witness described as a war zone.

Adam Lebel, 17, a senior at Bangor High School, died at the scene early Saturday on outer Essex Street. The car’s driver, Andrew Rice, 24, of Bangor was taken to Eastern Maine Medical Center, where he remained in serious condition Sunday.

Witnesses said the car was speeding before it left the road and that the vehicle reeked of alcohol after the 1:50 a.m. accident. The road was clear and dry at the time. Neither person was thrown from the car, which remained upright.

Bangor police said speed and alcohol had not been ruled out as causes of the accident. Routine blood tests were performed on both Lebel and Rice. Accident reconstructionists from state police and Bangor police were on the scene until late Saturday morning.

After failing to negotiate a turn south of the Church Road, the 1985 Ford Tempo left the road, smashed through a fence, a telephone pole and tree before coming to rest a few feet from a sign in the front yard at the Essex Stud Farm. Houses along the street lost power for about five hours after the crash.

“We heard this bomb go off. That’s what it sounded like,” said Denise Mitchell, owner of the horse farm. To reach the victims, she said, police officers had to cut through a birch tree she and her husband had planted in front of the house when they moved there 16 years ago. “It looked like a war zone.”

Mitchell, her husband, Kurt Smith, and a neighbor said a second car stopped at the scene of the accident and its occupants got out to see what had happened. Two or three males screamed and got back into their car and drove away toward Orono before police arrived, they said.

Bangor police Sgt. Jeff Millard said it appears that the other car was not involved in the accident but that the two vehicles may have been traveling together. He said it did not appear that they were racing or playing other games.

It was not clear how Lebel and Rice knew each other.

Millard said the investigation, which will include tests of the car for mechanical defects, would continue well into this week.

Smith said people frequently go off the road, especially in the winter, at the curve between the Church and Burleigh roads because they are driving too fast.

But Millard said he could not remember any other serious accidents at that location.

Andy Sturgeon, who lives across the street from the accident scene, said flames outside his bedroom window awakened him. It appears that a downed electrical wire touched his cable television line, setting it on fire. Sturgeon hurried his wife and children outside before finding that his house was not in danger.

At the time of the accident, Rice was on probation for other traffic violations. In March, he was convicted of operating a motor vehicle after license suspension, criminal mischief and theft by unauthorized taking. He was sentenced to a year of probation and fined $200.

In August 1999, he was convicted of attaching false license plates to a vehicle and fined $75. In April 1999, he was convicted of possession of marijuana and fined $200.

As authorities continued their investigation into the accident, Bangor police summoned a motorist for driving drunk on Essex Street after he bypassed a police van that had been blocking the road and protecting the accident scene.

Officer Steve Jordan reported seeing headlights approaching the van about 3:15 a.m. and that the vehicle, a pickup truck, drove around him, even after Jordan backed the van up to block off the inbound lane.

The pickup truck was stopped on the grass on the side of the road a short while later by Officer Michael Kenny, who asked the driver whether he had seen the roadblock with all the flashing blue lights. Driver Patrick Estey, 22, said he had.

Kenny reported that Estey admitted that he was coming from a friend’s home where he had been drinking and had passed out hours earlier. Estey also told police that he had smoked a marijuana cigarette earlier that day in Bangor.

Estey was charged with operating a motor vehicle while under the influence of intoxicants. His blood alcohol level registered 0.17 percent on the Intoxilyzer test, or more than twice the legal limit of 0.08 percent.