Five students killed in car crash while visiting a college
Five students who were were returning from a trip to visit a college were killed in crash caused by a wrong-way driver.
The car accident Sunday night on Interstate 80 east of Rawlins, Wyoming, killed two current students and three former students of Sylvan Hills High School, according to Pulaski County Special School District administrators.
Victims of the crash have been identified as Salomon Correa, Magdalene Franco, Andrea Prime, Suzy Prime and Ava Luplow.
They were visiting Jackson Hole Bible College in Wyoming and were driving back to Arkansas at the time of the crash.
Wyoming Highway Patrol troopers were alerted of a wrong-way driver on Interstate 80 around 6.52pm, and five minutes later, that the driver had crashed into other vehicles.
The Dodge Ram 3500 going the wrong direction struck a commercial truck, a passenger vehicle and another commercial truck. The second truck reportedly tried to avoid a collision by driving into the median and after exiting the median, hit a Ford F-150 head-on. The five occupants of the Ford F-150 were fatally hurt, and other motorists in the series of crashes were hospitalized with critical injuries.
Authorities arrested the Dodge driver on suspicion of impairment. He could face more charges.
More than 100 people attended a candlelight vigil on Monday.
‘I didn’t believe it until I got all over social media and that’s all I saw,’ said an alum of the high school, Quint Scruggs. ‘I told everybody, there’s no way I don’t believe it.’
Scruggs said three girls he went to high school with who died were ‘always joyful, I mean there was never a dull moment, always made you laugh’.
A school district official said classes were to resume on Tuesday with counselors on hand.
‘No words can express the depths of that,’ Sherwood Mayor Mary Jo Heyetownsell told KATV. ‘Certainly we need to be ever vigilant in terms of their peers, their friends who are gonna be so impacted by this.’
The crash is under investigation by the highway patrol.
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