Victims of Columbia County pileup crash identified
Four people killed in a massive pileup in south central Wisconsin last week were identified Wednesday, and among them was an Oconomowoc woman.
The crashes happened Friday on northbound Interstate-90/94/39 near Lodi in Columbia County.
Killed were Samantha McMullen, 23, of Oconomowoc; Joseph Kosinski, 72, of Madison; Phillip Bruno, 55, of Ingleside, Illinois; and Eleanor Heeringa-Owen, 59, of DeForest.
All four were in separate vehicles and died at the scene.
Suffering life-threatening injuries were Ross Kopfer, 50, of Oconomowoc and a 10-year-old Oconomowoc boy in Kopfer’s pickup truck who was not named. Two others suffered injuries that were not life-threatening — Dawn Marshall, 52, of Cleveland, Ohio, and
Clayton Mortenson, 24, of Poynette.
A Columbia County highway worker and two state troopers also were injured. Their names were not released.
The sequence of events that led to the four deaths and seven injuries began when two semitrailer trucks crashed into each other on I-90/94/39 at the State Highway 60 exit near Lodi, according to the Wisconsin State Patrol. That rear-end crash was reported at 3:53 a.m. Friday with no injuries.
At 5:11 a.m., a truck crashed into the initial accident scene, seriously injuring a highway worker and two troopers. They were taken to UW Hospital.
At 6:45 a.m., as northbound traffic backed up because of the earlier crashes, a semitrailer truck traveling at highway speeds created a chain-reaction crash involving four passenger vehicles, two semitrailer tractors and a dump truck. The fatalities and additional injuries occurred in this crash.