Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Fatal limo crash
All 18 in vehicle, two pedestrians killed in deadliest wreck in a decade.
SCHOHARIE, N.Y. — A limousine loaded with revelers headed to a 30th birthday party ran a stop sign at the end of a highway and slammed into an SUV parked outside a store, killing all 18 people in the limo and two pedestrians in the deadliest U.S. transportation accident in almost a decade, officials and relatives of the victims said Sunday.
The collision turned a relaxed Saturday 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 were wonderful girls,” their aunt, Barbara Douglas, told reporters on Sunday. “They’d do anything for you and they were very close to each other and they loved their family.”
Douglas said three of the sisters were with their husbands, and she identified them as Amy and Axel Steenburg, Abigail and Adam Jackson, Mary and Rob Dyson, and Allison King.
“They did the responsible thing getting a limo so they wouldn’t have to drive anywhere,” she said, adding the couples had several children between them who they left at home.
The 2001 Ford Excursion limousine was traveling southwest on New York 30 in Schoharie, about 170 miles north of New York City, around 2 p.m. Eastern time when it failed to stop at a T-junction with New York 30A, State Police First Deputy Superintendent Christopher Fiore said at a news conference in Latham, N.Y.
It went across the road and hit an unoccupied SUV parked at the Apple Barrel Country Store, killing the limousine driver and 17 passengers, as well as 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 and had been in their parked car at the store at the time of the accident.
The store manager, Jessica Kirby, told The New York Times that the limo was coming down a hill at “probably over 60 mph.” In an email to The Associated Press, she complained that the junction where the crashed occurred is accident-prone.
“We have had 3 tractor trailer type trucks run through the stop through our driveway and into a field behind the business,” Kirby wrote. “All of these occurred during business hours and could’ve killed someone then.”
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.
Speaking through tears on the telephone, Valerie Abeling said her 34-year-old niece Erin Vertucci was among the victims, along with Vertucci’s husband, 30-year-old Shane McGowan. They were on their way to a friend’s birthday party, she said; her own daughter had been invited along but couldn’t go.
At the news conference, Fiore didn’t comment on speed or whether the occupants of the vehicle had been wearing seat belts.
“This is one of the biggest losses of life that we’ve seen in a long, long time,” safety board Chairman Robert Sumwalt told reporters.
It’s the deadliest transportation accident since February 2009, when Colgan Air Flight 3407 crashed near Buffalo, N.Y., killing 50 people, Sumwalt said.
And it appears to be the deadliest land-vehicle accident since a bus ferrying nursing home patients away from Hurricane Rita caught fire in Texas 2005, killing 23.
The vehicle was an after-market stretch limousine, according to an official who was briefed on the matter and was not authorized to discuss an ongoing investigation publicly so spoke on condition of anonymity.
Safety issues concerning 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 air bags, reinforced rollover protection bars and accessible emergency exits. That grand jury called on New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to assemble a task force on limousine safety.
Limousines built in factories are already required to meet stringent safety regulations, but when cars are converted into limos, safety features are sometimes removed, leading to gaps in safety protocols, the grand jury wrote.
Information for this article was contributed by Mike Basalmo, John Kekis and David Klepper of The Associated Press.