Party limo crash that killed 20 ‘sounded like an explosion’
Victims include four sisters en route to birthday party in upstate New York town
SCHOHARIE, N.Y.— A limousine loaded with revellers bound for a 30th birthday celebration blew through a stop sign and slammed into a parked SUV outside a store on Saturday, killing all 18 people in the limo and two pedestrians. It was the deadliest U.S. transportation accident in nearly a decade, officials said Sunday.
The collision turned a relaxed afternoon into chaos at an upstate New York spot popular with tourists taking in the fall foliage.
Relatives said the limousine was carrying four sisters and their friends to a birthday celebration for the youngest.
“They did the responsible thing getting a limo so they wouldn’t have to drive anywhere,” their aunt, Barbara Douglas, told reporters Sunday. She said three of the sisters were with their husbands.
Douglas identified her nieces and their spouses as Amy and Axel Steenburg, Abigail and Adam Jackson, Mary and Rob Dyson, and Allison King.
Douglas said the couples had several children between them whom they left at home.
“They were wonderful girls,” Douglas said. “They’d do anything for you and they were very close to each other and they loved their family.”
The limousine was rented by Axel and Amy Steenburg of Amsterdam, N.Y., who had married over the summer, according to Lester Andrews, Axel Steenburg’s stepfather. The group of friends had gathered to celebrate Amy’s 30th birthday.
Axel’s brother, Rich Steenburg, was also killed and is survived by his 10-year-old daughter and 14-year-old stepson. The Steenburg brothers both worked a foundry that produces semiconductors, Andrews said.
The victims were a tight-knit group of friends, most in their 30s, who had been recently married or had young children, according to Erin Flaherty, a mutual friend who lives in Manhattan. “They were together multiple times a week, always hanging out,” said Flaherty.
Speaking through tears on the telephone, Valerie Abeling said her 34-year-old niece, Erin Vertucci, was among the victims, along with Vertucci’s new husband, 30-year-old Shane McGowan.
The couple were married in June at a “beautiful wedding” in upstate New York, Abeling said. “They had everything going for them.”
Vertucci was an administrative assistant at St. Mary’s Healthcare in Amsterdam, N.Y., Abeling said.
She said the group was headed to a brewery in Cooperstown for the birthday celebration.
Abeling said her daughter, who was invited but did not join the party, recounted that the group had rented “some kind of bus” to go to the brewery, but the vehicle broke down before reaching its destination. The travel provider then sent a stretch limousine to take the group the rest of the way, she said.
“The vehicle appeared in terrible condition,” Abeling said, recalling a text message her daughter received from Erin Vertucci.
Twenty minutes later, all the passengers on board the limo were dead.
“These were friends just start- ing their lives, getting married and this is how it ended,” Abeling said. “It’s a tragic loss of beautiful souls.”
The 2001 Ford Excursion limousine was travelling southwest on Route 30 in Schoharie, about 270 kilometres north of New York City, when it failed to stop at a T-junction with state Route 30A at 2 p.m. Saturday, State Police First Deputy Supt. Christopher Fiore said at a news conference.
It went across the road and hit an unoccupied SUV parked at the Apple Barrel Country Store, killing the limousine driver, the 17 passengers and two people outside the vehicle.
The crash “sounded like an explosion,” said Linda Riley, of nearby Schenectady, who was on a shopping trip with her sisters. She had been in another car parked at the store, saw a body on the ground and heard people start screaming.
The store manager, Jessica Kirby, told the New York Times the limo was coming down a hill at “probably over 60 miles per hour” (95 kilometres per hour). In an email to The Associated Press, she complained that the junction where the crashed occurred is accident-prone.
She added that the state Department of Transportation has banned heavy trucks from the intersection, but there are constant smaller crashes — “more accidents than I can count.”
The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating.
“This is one of the biggest losses of life that we’ve seen in a long, long time,” board chair Robert Sumwalt said.
It was the deadliest U.S. transportation accident since February 2009, when Colgan Air Flight 3407 crashed in Buffalo, N.Y., killing 50 people, he said.
Safety issues on such vehicles have arisen before, most notably after a wreck on Long Island in July 2015 in which four women on a winery tour were killed. They were in a Lincoln Town Car that had been cut apart and rebuilt in a stretch configuration to accommodate more passengers. The limousine was trying to make a U-turn and was struck by a pickup.
A grand jury found that vehicles converted into stretch limousines often don’t have safety measures including side-impact airbags, reinforced rollover protection bars and accessible emergency exits.