"Authorities still cannot say for sure what led a pickup carrying six area teenagers to go off a rural road and slam into a tree at the bottom of a hill near Middletown, killing four of them.
Advertisement
“We’re going to have to wait for the (Illinois State Police) reconstructionists to give us that information,” Logan County Sheriff Steve Nichols said Tuesday.
“I don’t think alcohol was a factor,” he added. “We have no indicators telling us that.”
Meanwhile, Logan County’s highway department plans to evaluate the stretch of road near the crash site to determine if any safety features are needed.
The crash, which occurred late Friday where 1300th Street crosses Polecat Hill and turns south to become 250th Avenue, killed Katherine L. “Katie” Carpentier, 15, of Lincoln; Ross B. Conrady, 18, of Elkhart; Katelyn “Katie” A. McCarty, 19, of Taylorville; and Christopher J. McGlasson, 19, of Middletown.
The two survivors — Zach Rickord and Clark Schoonover — were taken to Memorial Medical Center in Springfield. Rickord remained in serious condition Tuesday night, while Schoonover’s condition still was listed as fair, a hospital spokeswoman said.
Conrady was driving his pickup, which had an extended cab, with the other five teens on a curved portion of road on the downside of the hill at about 11:30 p.m. when the vehicle left the pavement, slammed into a tree and caught fire.
Carpentier, Conrady and McGlasson — a sophomore, senior and 2006 graduate of Lincoln Community High School, respectively — died at the scene. McCarty, a freshman at Springfield College in Illinois-Benedictine University, was pronounced dead about an hour later at Abraham Lincoln Memorial Hospital in Lincoln.
“The preliminary cause of death … is blunt force trauma on all four (victims),” Logan County Coroner Bob Thomas said Tuesday. “We think they all passed by the time the fire broke out.”
As flames started to spread through the cab, Rickord and Schoonover were pulled to safety by a motorist who came upon the crash site.
Nichols couldn’t say what role, if any, the road’s curved and hilly terrain played in the wreck.
“It’s a big hill, yes. But everybody familiar with it knows it’s there,” he said. “… I looked up how many accidents we had there in the last five or six years, and we’ve only had I think five accidents in that area, and all of them have been just property-damage accidents.”
Bret Aukamp, Logan County’s highway engineer, said he, too, reviewed his records after he learned of Friday night’s crash and found only one wreck that involved serious injury since 2001.
“This is the first time that we had an accident this bad, a fatality, let alone a multiple fatality,” he said. “It’s a difficult portion of roadway because of that hill, and because there has not been any accident history out there, we really haven’t been looking at that as a specific safety issue. Now this changes things.”
Aukamp said the highway department will assess the road, which falls under the direct supervision of Corwin Township, this week. He said personnel were unable to do so over the weekend because of a steady stream of mourners at the crash site.
Signage and other warnings will all be taken into consideration, he said.
“We want to go out objectively and see what can be eliminated or improved and try to make it as safe as we can,” Aukamp said. "
http://www.sj-r.com/News/stories/25546.asp
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment