For the second time in a little more than 48 hours, a driver going the wrong way on a local divided highway was involved in a head-on collision.

On Wednesday, a New Castle couple was killed when their car was hit head-on by a sport utility vehicle traveling north in the southbound lanes of state Route 60 in Shenango Township.

Friday, a man took Brookfield police on a chase that ended in a head-on, wrong-way crash in the eastbound lanes of state Route 82, about a half-mile west of state Route 7.

Police said the chase began at about 7:30 p.m., when a caller reported a car had hit and ridden a guardrail for some distance near Oxford Automotive on Sharon-Bedford Road and kept going.

Police said a responding cruiser was nearly hit head-on by a westbound car in the eastbound lanes of Route 82. The car then missed by "only inches" Brookfield's two-week-old fire truck, which was also responding to the hit-and-run call, and two more squad cars, police said.