BIDDEFORD — A Biddeford man suffered life-threatening injuries after his car flipped off of a Maine Turnpike entrance ramp in Portland early Sunday morning, according to police.

Police say Tamer Tilahun, 24, of Biddeford, was driving on the Rand Road southbound entrance ramp at Exit 47 in Portland when his Mercury Marquis hit the guardrail on the left side of the ramp, crossed back over to the other side of the road, and shot up and over a snowbank and off of the ramp. The vehicle landed on its roof in a pile of snow abutting the turnpike.

“He catapulted off of the overpass, onto the highway below, landing on the roof (of his vehicle),” Stephen McCausland, public information officer for the Maine State Police, said this morning.

Tilahun is believed to have been drinking and driving too fast, added McCausland. The accident occurred at about 2:30 in the morning on Sunday, he said, when roadways were slick with a fresh coating of snow.

No other vehicles were involved in the accident, said McCausland, and Tilahun was taken to Portland’s Maine Medical Center where a spokesman said this morning that the injured man is in critical condition.

The ramp was closed at about 6:30 a.m. Sunday, so that police could perform a “reconstruction of the crash,” according to information posted on the Maine Turnpike Authority’s website.

The ramp was reported open at 7:19 a.m.

— Staff Writer Angelo J. Verzoni can be contacted at 282-1535, ext. 329 or averzoni@journaltribune.com.