Posted on 03/24/2022 8:40:50 PM PDT by BenLurkin
The six high school students were packed into a small, 2015 Chevy Spark with just four seats - and only the two teenaged girls riding in the front seat were wearing seatbelts, the Oklahoma Highway Patrol said Wednesday.
The six girls were all students of Tishomingo Public School, according to the district's superintendent. The driver was 16 years old, three of the other girls were 15 and the other two passengers were both 17.
The two vehicles collided around 12.19pm on Tuesday at the intersection of U.S. 377 and Oklahoma 22 in Tishomingo, a rural city of about 3,000 located about 115 miles southeast of Oklahoma City.
Troopers said the girls' vehicle was traveling eastbound on Oklahoma 22 and stopped at a stop sign at the intersection of U.S. 377 just before 12:30 p.m.
OHP Trooper Shelby Humphrey said Tuesday night that the girls attempted to turn at the intersection, which maps show is at the end of a 90-degree curve of U.S. 377 from east to south.
The girls' car was struck by the semi which was approaching from the east on U.S. 377, KXII-TV reported.
The force of the crash moved the car about approximately 300 feet from the intersection, KXII-TV reported, leaving it in a mangled mess with doors and ripped off.
According to the crash report released by OHP on Wednesday morning, the circumstances of the wreck remain under investigation.
Four of the girls, including the driver, were pronounced dead at the scene of the crash, according to the OHP report. The other two girls died after being transported to the hospital.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
All of my children have to drive a Sequoia until they leave the house. They aren’t new vehicles but they are safe for that guaranteed teenage crash.
“That should be a flyover.” Yes. Very, very sad. Tragic. The loss of six innocent young ladies. The road design is poor.
6 teenage girls in one vehicle...what could go wrong?
Or the pregnant roller skate she was driving lacked the ability to accelerate out of its own way.
“Country music star Blake Shelton, who has a 1,300 acre ranch in Tishomingo,”
WHO CARES! What does he have to do with ANYTHING!
I HATE these frickin celebrities sticking their noses into things that they have NOTHING to do with.
Did he do ANYTHING about this dangerous intersection in his community? NO!
I’ll bet the parents are “comforted” by the fact that “Blake Shelton” FEELS THEIR PAIN!
PUKE, spit!
I've lived here 25 years, and the area is seriously overbuilt. At the nearest school, there are two four way stops within 200 yards.
During non-school hours, speed limit is often violated, and rolling stops are far too often. There's an occasional accident, nothing serious thankfully.
I have never seen such a hokey interchange design in my life. They certainly don’t exist around here, would be unthinkable. We would have ramps and overpasses and cloverleafs.
Along that same line, my wife and daughter in our white Ford Explorer were in a somewhat similar accident last summer. A girl (17) blew through a stop & went across 3 lanes of the 4-lane rural highway my wife was driving on. Our Explorer tagged the girl's sedan and veered right, across the 4th lane and slammed into a low guardrail on the edge of a steep high bank into a borrow pit (pond). Good thing we had NOT raised the Explorer for better ground clearance (we do a fair amount of camping, exploring on poor roads, etc.) or it might have flipped over the guardrail. Both vehicles were totaled; somehow no one was seriously injured; the worst injury was my wife's ankle (took her 3+ weeks to walk normally). If our Explorer had been a semi, I'd say the 17 y/o would likely be very seriously injured or dead, the semi would not veer as sharply, probably, but, considering what the Explorer did to the guardrail I'd say still a 50/50 chance it'd go into that borrow pit. Visibility there is great, beautiful sunny day about 1 pm, recently well redone intersection, the DRL's were on... The dang girl just didn't look.
We have one of those “double diamond” / crossover interchanges on a very busy major Interstate / US Hwy. intersection about 20 miles from here. It seems to work pretty well, once those of the rural locals who don’t drive a lot in bigger cities got used to it.
A few of the new design intersections on the same US Highway out toward us I’m not so sure of. They are confusing, the signage is even more confusing (unless you are an Austin, TX experience level driver), and they just seem to trade one problem (see my post above for a personal example) for a couple others. IMO, rather than the major rebuilds of the intersections, the State just should have put in a traffic controlled stop light at the most busy intersection, and better signage w/ flashing lights or maybe traffic controlled active signage / red lights for the side roads at the others.
You'd be honking your horn all day long in Alaska. I never even knew you were supposed to come to a complete stop until I got a ticket on a Marine Corps base three years after I got my license.
I don’t mean the D.D. design is applicable to the scene of this accident, just interesting to me.
True. I used to live in Tishomingo...I have driven that stretch of road 1000s of times over several years. As Hwy 22 approaches US377, the road curves a bit to create a near 90 degree turn no different from any other T intersection.
The Oklahoma Highway Patrol released their preliminary report today and they have revealed that witnesses report that when the Chevy Spark got to the intersection, there was another car in front of her, stopped at the stop sign. When that first car pulled out from the stop onto US377, the 16 year old driver of the Spark just followed through the intersection without stopping for the stop sign. She ran the stop sign. I guess she thought she could beat the truck. My guess is they were running behind and were trying to get back to school before the tardy bell so she was in a hurry and ran the stop sign thinking she had enough time go get across the truck’s lane of traffic before he got there. She badly misjudged her ability to make the turn.
LOL, I’ll bet the traffic doesn’t compare to North Texas, with over 6 million residents.
Colorado had no teen driver restrictions, as Oklahoma apparently still is doing, up until around 25 years ago.
That all changed after a horrific accident that took the lives of all 4 teens who were out for a spin on a school lunch-break.
The car was owned by the youngest son of the family who were, and still are, our closest non-relative friends.
Mark was 17 or 18 and highly intelligent and bored with high school, so before his senior year he took the GED and passed, and started at the local community college that same Fall that would have been his senior year.
He had this sporty little red car that he had bought cheaply (its body and engine I think were both trashed out), and then used his savings from after-school & summer jobs to fix it up into near-pristine shape, with a lot of advice from a mechanic friend.
He would often leave the college at lunchtime to meet his girlfriend who was still in high school, plus some other close friends still in school, for a spin.
One of those friends was 2 years younger than him, and had been a close-by neighbor of his for many years. When this kid first got his learner's permit at around 15 yrs 9 mo (or was it 15 yrs 6 mo??), he often begged Mark to allow him to drive his sporty red car. But Mark didn't trust his driving ability yet, and always said No.
But that fateful day, the kid had just turned 16 and had obtained his license that morning before school. Again he begged Mark for permission to drive it. This time Mark relented, I guess because it was such a big day for his younger friend.
So the kid was driving, Mark and his girlfriend were in the back seat, and another boy was in the front passenger seat. They were heading south on a 2-lane road that crossed Highway 34 - a 4-lane road, and had to stop at a Stop sign before crossing.
In addition to the handicaps of being a new driver, of driving an unfamiliar vehicle for the first time, of being distracted by 3 other teens all talking next to and behind him, the newly-minted driver was on an unfamiliar road that had some ongoing construction project on it that resulted in large distracting signs, barriers off to the sides, lane detours and so on.
He never saw the stop sign at Hwy 34 and just drove right into the path of a large flatbed truck without slowing down at all. The truck driver remembers a sudden flash of red bearing down on him from the right, with no time to react.
All 4 teens died immediately or within a few hours. Mark's parents got to the hospital too late to hold his hand as he slipped off of this world. His girlfriend's Dad was the first parent to learn of the accident. He was a local policeman, and heard the radioed report of a crash involving a small red car, that filled him with a sense of foreboding, especially as it occurred over the school lunch hour. His sense wasn't wrong.
One result of this was a change in Colorado law regarding new teen drivers. In part it reads:
Teens with a permit:
Teens with a permit must be accompanied by a driving instructor, parent, legal guardian or a licensed adult 21 years of age or older (authorized by parent/guardian) in the front seat, buckled up.
Teens with a license: For the first six months, no passengers under 21, unless a parent or other licensed adult driver over 21 is in the vehicle.
For the next six months, one passenger under age 21.
There are other restrictions as well. Eg, no driving between midnight and 5am.
Besides being traumatic for the local high schoolers, the accident was big news all over the state. Some state office that teaches safety to students asked Mark's Dad if they could keep the wreck, to be hauled around the state on a flatbed to be used at state high schools as an eye-popping prop accompanying a road safety lesson. His answer, "I don't care if you keep the car; I just want back the young man who was in it".
The next year, in a different part of the state, I heard a 16-year old step-nephew of ours complaining about this new law that made things tough on teen drivers for no good reason at all. Boy, did he get an earful from me!
I bet you’re really a ton of fun at parties.
I can’t seem to see the stop sign at the corner. Was it knocked down, or is it just too small to be visible in the photo?
>> running behind and were trying to get back to school before the tardy bell so she was in a hurry
There but for the grace of God went I and some friends.. For some reason, that still scares me decades later.
CCMVRWC, my condolences.
I think those laws restricting young passengers with young drivers are an excellent idea.
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