.....many times end up dead. Unfortunately, she/he took 6 others with them. 2 kids in Ohio died earlier this year doing the same thing....passing in the breakdown lane. Stupid stupid stupid.
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Seven Dead in Maine Freeway Crash
Monday, May 10, 2004
CARMEL, Maine — Investigators said they were making progress in identifying the seven people killed in the crash of their sport utility vehicle that sped into the breakdown lane of Interstate 95 to pass two cars.
The accident at 2:45 p.m. Sunday in the northbound lanes some 10 miles west of Bangor was one of the deadliest highway crashes in Maine history. Three of the dead were children under the age of 10.
The Ford Explorer (search) went out of control after clipping one of the cars it was trying to pass, said Stephen McCausland, spokesman for the Maine Department of Public Safety (search). It then turned sideways, became airborne, slammed into some trees in the median and came to rest on its roof, he said.
Two women and a child were thrown from the SUV, while its other four occupants — believed to be two children, a woman and possibly a teenager — were inside.
All of the women were believed to be from Maine, McCausland said, "and the assumption is that so were the children."
The Explorer had out-of-state plates, but he would not specify which state. He said the vehicle had been rented in Maine by a Maine resident earlier in the day.
"We're making progress on the identifications," he said Sunday night. "We know who rented the vehicle, and the troopers are fairly confident that that person was one of the victims."
Troopers were gathering in Bangor to try to contact victims' relatives to help with the identifications and determine where the SUV was headed.
Police initially reported the death toll at five, but the number was raised to seven after a wrecker was able to lift the vehicle into a position where troopers could look inside.
A dozen state troopers were at the scene, McCausland said, and medical examiners began removing the bodies that were later transported to a local funeral home.
Firefighters equipped with chain saws cut down some of the trees in which the SUV was wedged so that it could be righted and removed.
Police had no immediate estimate as to how fast the Explorer was going, but McCausland said it was traveling at a high rate of speed.
Troopers quoted witnesses as saying one car was in the travel lane and the other was passing it in the passing lane when the Explorer came up quickly from behind.
"They told the troopers that the Explorer came up initially at a high rate of speed in the passing lane and then veered into the breakdown lane and passed both, clipping one of them," McCausland said.
Skid marks from the out-of-control SUV were visible across the roadway in both lanes, he said.
The northbound lanes were closed for hours, and traffic was backed up to Newport, at least 10 miles to the west. Troopers were able to ease the tie-up by opening a crossover to allow vehicles to turn into the southbound lanes.
The northbound lanes were reopened to traffic shortly before 10 p.m.
The crash was the deadliest on a Maine public road since seven occupants of a car were killed when it was broadsided and run over by a tractor-trailer in Richmond on Sept. 5, 1958. The state's worst crash ever occurred on a privately owned logging road on Sept. 12, 2002, when 14 migrant workers perished when their van went off a bridge in the Allagash Wilderness Waterway.
