[kenth]

It's sad.

It's also disgusting to see the left continually use the deaths of people to further their agenda. Why else would we continually see articles such as this implicate the vehicle as the perpetrator of such accidents?

[Rummyfan]

These SUVs seem to have minds of their own!

[GaltMeister]

Another one of those 'wild and crazy' SUV's.

No mention of a driver - thank god nobody was driving it when it went wild - would have been another casualty. /sarcasm

[TommyDale]

At a speed in excess of 90 miles per hour, any vehicle would have suffered the same consequences. Why bother to even mention the term 'SUV'?

[SeeRushToldU_So]

I saw this on Foxnews last night. Witnesses said the driver was driving on the emergency lane at 90+.

[SeeRushToldU_So]

I have had 5 SUVs in my life, I have never driven that fast in one. I am not comfortable in an SUV at near that speed.

[Darnright]

>A rented SUV was speeding at more than 90 mph when it veered out of control, killing seven people inside, including four young children, authorities said.<

Well, I guess it did, seeing that the dang fool driving it was SPEEDING at 90 MPH!!!!!

Liberals, gotta love 'em.

[kellynla]

90mph?
some real irresponsible adults with 4 children in their care!

[LonghornFreeper]

It is a simple fact that in accidents involving SUV's the mortality rate is higher both for those in the SUV and for those in the other vehicles. No amount of spin will change that fact. SUV's flip when a minivan or car would not.

I know this from personal experience. Last summer on I-20 coming home to Texas from Georgia I was in a minivan with 3 friends. I was driving, and I was passing a truck at about 75 with cruise control on. He decided to move over quickly and without warning when we were halfway past him. He hit us and knocked us into the median, the airbag went off and I lost control of the vehicle. We made an almost 90 degree left turn, crossed the median and the other side of the highway, and slammed into the upsloping ground on the other side. The van was totaled, but the worst injury any of us had was some glass embedded in one persons arm. If we had been in an SUV, it would have flipped and we would be dead now.

Unless you are doing real farm work, in which case you would have a truck, or are going off road, there is nothing that an SUV does that a minivan doesn't do better. If you want to drive an SUV, that is fine, there is absolutely nothing I can do about it, and I am not proposing that the goverment do anything about it. Next time we have to make nice to Saudi Arabia you will know why.

[familyofman]

The driver was the cause of this accident. The reports I have seen said the speeding vehicle tried to pass 2 other vehicles (1 in each lane, travel & passing) using the 'break down' lane. The speeding vehicle in the break down lane swerved into one of the other cars and lost control. Poor, really poor driver judgement caused this tradgedy. I wonder if the driver had any experience with an SUV prior to renting this one.

[afraidfortherepublic]

Why was the driver going 90mph? I don't think that' legal anywhere in the US.

[biblewonk]

Unstable at high speed.

[pghkevin]

Did the SUV suffer from an abusive childhood?


another thought,


Will the rental car company be sued because a driver with suspended license was behind the wheel (not driving mind you, the SUV was at fault).

[raccoonradio]

Read about this in Boston papers. While it's sad it also was so unnecessary. She had no license, was going 90 mph, passing in the breakdown lane; most of the passengers were not belted in; there were no booster seats for the kids. Was she in a big hurry to meet her beau from the Internet? And what's with bringing 6 other people to what would normally be a one-on-one situation?

While the deaths are tragic, consider that so many things
contributed to this accident. I don't have an SUV but I'll bet anyone who drives one recklessly risks getting into an accident like this. Heard about one SUV rollover (with fatalities)in Boston awhile back--but they (teens and
young adults) were speeding and weaving in and out of lanes.

This was a brand new car (1,000 miles on it or so) and chances are it was made well. However, reckless driving
was ultimately what caused the deaths of these seven
people.

[csvset]

'Never thought I'd bury my daughter'

By GREGORY D. KESICH and JOSIE HUANG, Portland Press Herald Staff Writers

Copyright © 2004 Blethen Maine Newspapers Inc.

E-mail this story to a friend

  Also on this page:
DONATIONS

 

	ADVERTISEMENT
	File photo Danielle Saint Paulin, 29
	File photo Hope Stuart Gagnon, 29, of South Portland and her three children, from left, Deion Stuart, 8, T'keyah "Tamisha" Stuart, 6, and Ariana Stuart, 4.
	Staff photo by Gordon Chibroski Mourning Danielle Saint Paulin are, from left: Courtney VanDeventer, 13, daughter; Jaelee Saint Paulin, 1, daughter; Raymond Cary, 12, cousin; Michelle Sanga, friend; and Saint Paulin's mother, Shirley Adams.
	DONATIONS To make a donation to the Stuart Family Memorial Fund, go to any branch of the People's Heritage Bank. To top of story

Shirley Adams' last conversation with her daughter was a short one.

Danielle Saint Paulin asked Adams to watch her children while she joined her friends on a spur-of-the-moment road trip to Fort Kent.

"I wished her a happy Mother's Day, and that was it," Adams recalled Monday. "I never thought I would have to bury my daughter."

By Sunday evening, Adams learned that Saint Paulin, 29, and her two close friends Kelley Armstrong, 28, and Hope Gagnon, 29, were dead. So were Armstrong's son and Gagnon's three children, all of them between the ages of 4 and 8 years old.

The news stunned relatives and friends of the three women and four children who died in a Mother's Day crash on Interstate 95 near Bangor. It also caused officials to interrupt classes Monday at South Portland's Dora L. Small Elementary School, which two of Gagnon's children attended.

Friends of the dead women gravitated to Adams' Salem Street home in Portland on Monday to comfort her and Saint Paulin's four children.

Saint Paulin and Gagnon met as teenagers in South Portland and were always visiting or talking on the phone, Adams said. Armstrong, who grew up in Cumberland, met them later when she moved to South Portland, and the three became best friends.

"They liked to chill" said Courtney VanDeventer, 13, one of Saint Paulin's daughters. "They weren't big partyers, but they liked to go out and hang out with friends."

Friends say Gagnon organized Sunday's trip. She had met a man over the Internet who lived in Fort Kent, and he invited her to come for a visit with her children, they said. She asked Armstrong and Saint Paulin to go along.

"They were just going up for the day," friend Michelle Sanga said. "They all decided to go up together."

Police did not confirm those details Monday. They said they did not know the reason for the trip or if Fort Kent was the destination. An investigation into the crash is ongoing.

According to Maine State Police, the three women rented a Ford Explorer just after noon Sunday, and filled it with Gagnon's children, Deion Stuart, 8, T'keyah "Tamisha" Stuart, 6, and Ariana Stuart, 4, and Armstrong's 4-year-old son, Kristian. Investigators later found McDonald's wrappers and Happy Meal boxes around the destroyed vehicle.

Armstrong originally planned to leave her son with a sitter, but decided to bring him so they could spend the day together, VanDeventer said. "I wanted to go too, but they wouldn't let me," she said.

VanDeventer stayed behind with her three siblings: Michael Coombs, 11, Anthony VanDeventer, 7, and Jaelee Saint Paulin, who had her first birthday in January. Danielle Saint Paulin's husband, Mackenzie, did not go on the trip and was not at Adams' house Monday.

"He needs some quiet time," Adams said. "It's hit him rough."

Kelley Armstrong was a graduate of Yarmouth High School and grew up in the Cumberland Center area, said longtime friend Janice Selig.

Selig described her as a wonderful mother whose son, Kristian, was the most important thing in her life. He was looking forward to kindergarten, and got a $5 bill under his pillow after losing his first tooth just last week, she said.

"She always treated her son just like a little person," Selig said. "She made him be a great kid."

Friends and relatives remembered Hope Gagnon as a popular, outgoing person who coached cheerleading one year at South Portland High School.

"She just loved everybody," said Kim Coon, who grew up with Gagnon and graduated with her in 1993. "She was in every clique."

Gagnon studied to be a transcriptionist at Husson College, but she took jobs that allowed her to work out of her home so she could be with her children, her family said. Most recently, she performed data entry and answered e-mails for Patriot Video, said her 16-year-old sister, Mandy Stuart.

She would take T'keyah to cheerleading practice with the Elite All-Stars, and had planned to coach Deion's soccer team last year - even though she didn't know how to play - until a more experienced parent volunteered.

"She was going to learn how to play," said family friend Dawn Donald.

Gagnon also looked after her two younger sisters. "When my mother passed away (in 2002), she's who I went to," said Anna Stuart, 22. "She was a good listener and helped me out."

Family members said they didn't know that Gagnon was planning a trip north. They said she didn't drive - instead getting around town mostly by cab or bus - and didn't travel far. When the weather was pleasant, they said, she would take her children to nearby Willard Beach.

At the elementary school attended by Gagnon's two oldest children, Deion and T'keyah, counselors from the Center for Grieving Children helped staff and students deal with the news.

Counselors visited each classroom, and met individually with students who sought their services, Principal Bonnie Hicks said. Staff contacted families whose children were close friends with either of the siblings.

It was the first year at the K-5 school for Deion, an athletic second-grader, and T'keyah, a bubbly first-grader. Family said they lived in Gorham, before Gagnon and Aaron Gagnon divorced. Despite being new to the school, the two children had many friends across grade levels, Hicks said.

Parent Jane Batzell said her 7-year-old son and his classmates grieved for Deion on Monday by expressing themselves with clay.

Batzell's son made a heart. Other students cut out the letters "D-E-I-O-N" and put it on his locker. "Most of the children cried. And he cried," Batzell said.

"The kids are very thoughtful, and care very deeply about what happened," Hicks said. "They're working through it."

[Mr. Jeeves]

Chalk it up to another person who is clueless about lane change etiquette:

1) When changing lanes to the left, traffic in the lane to your left has the right-of-way. Wait for a safe opening.

2) When changing lanes to the right, you have the right of way, and traffic should yield to you. I think about 75% of traffic accidents are caused by nimrods who don't follow this rule, and try to speed up to to get ahead of cars signalling an intended lane change to the right.

3) (Corollary to rule 2) Never pass on the right. Exception: if a doofus in the fast lane is doing 50 - even then, be wary, for he's probably dumb enough to make a sudden, no-signal lane change just as you start to pass.

4) Change ONE lane at a time unless the road is empty. California drivers seem to love to stay in the fast lane until a quarter-mile from their exit, then make a majestic, four-lane swoop (often with no signal) to hit the offramp just in time. That causes another 20% of all accidents.

5) ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS, use your turn signal. It is not optional.

Additional observations:

> Watch for the "flinch". I've noticed that cars who seem to make a slight jerk to one side within their lanes are about to make a late- or no-signal lane change.

> The dumbest drivers on the road are white women (usually with kids) in minivans or SUVs - they won't do risky things, but they will hesitate when faced with making quick decisions.

> The most dangerous drivers on the road are white or Asian men in new, low-end BMW's or Mercedes Benz's (probably leased). They think they are Jeff Gordon on the Autobahn.

> If you are a white male pedestrian, never step into the crosswalk when a black female bus driver is anywhere nearby. She will relish the opportunity to add your jogging shorts to her trophy case.

> Pedestrians in Berkeley, California pay absolutely no attention to traffic signals, crosswalks, or the rules of courtesy. You are "car scum" and are expected to stop and wait for them whenever they feel like crossing the street. This may be true in other leftist enclaves, too.

[showme_the_Glory]

If my Tahoe ever does that. "I'll just die".

[Alouette]

An SUV is not a car, it is a truck. If you don't normally drive one, it can take some getting used to. I rented an SUV on a trip last year, it's a LOT of vehicle (and I am used to driving a minivan.)

[montag813]

"A rented SUV was speeding at more than 90 mph when it clipped a car it was trying to pass and veered out of control, killing seven people inside, including four young children BEFORE TAKING IT'S OWN LIFE."

[csvset]

Malfunction ruled out in crash

By DAVID HENCH, Portland Press Herald Writer

Copyright © 2004 Blethen Maine Newspapers Inc.

Mechanical malfunction did not cause the high-speed crash Sunday that killed the seven occupants of a sport utility vehicle outside Bangor, police said Tuesday.

Investigators pried open the wreckage of the rented 2004 Ford Explorer and analyzed the car's components. They searched for any malfunction that could have contributed to one of the deadliest accidents in state history, which killed three women and four young children from South Portland. Police found no defects in the vehicle, which had been driven just 1,100 miles.

Police also discovered nothing to shed light on why the driver would have swerved into the breakdown lane while going more than 90 mph in an effort to pass two cars that were side-by-side on Interstate 95. There were no alcoholic beverages in the car. Two vials of medication recovered from the wreckage were prescribed to two of the women and would not have compromised their driving, police said.

"There are going to be a lot of questions we probably will never have an answer to," said Maine State Police spokesman Stephen McCausland. "Why they were going so fast and why most of them were not belted are questions we will probably never know the answer to."

The three women set out after lunch on Mother's Day, having told friends they were planning a day trip to Fort Kent to meet a man that one of them had been communicating with over the Internet. That woman, Hope Stuart Gagnon, 29, had her three children with her: Deion Stuart, 8; T'keyah Stuart, 6; and Ariana Stuart, 4. Kelley Armstrong, 28, brought her 4-year-old son, Kristian Armstrong-Smith.

Danielle Saint Paulin, 29, came by herself. She had considered bringing her 13-year old daughter but decided against it.

Investigators found nothing in the car to indicate where the women were headed.

"We're going to give the vehicle one more good going-over (today) to make sure nothing anywhere would give us a clue where they were going to or coming from," said Lt. Wesley Hussey. "As of right now, we have nothing."

Police believe Gagnon was driving when the Explorer came up quickly behind two cars and swerved abruptly into the narrow shoulder along the right side of the interstate. As the Explorer pulled even with Nikki Yawn's 2004 Jeep Grand Cherokee they bumped lightly, barely creasing a flange over the Cherokee's front right tire.

But investigators suspect that contact was enough, combined with the narrow breakdown lane and the rumble strip, to make the Explorer carom right, then swerve left as the driver overcorrected.

A series of black skid marks stretched across the two northbound lanes of the interstate, indicating the car was probably sliding sideways, police said.

"Instinct is going to tell you to hit the brakes. Whether or not they did, who knows," Hussey said. "Talking to the reconstructionist, they were probably either going into a sideways skid or were into it already as they were crossing the pavement."

The vehicle does have an event data recorder, a so-called black box, but the information police were able to recover from it was in a form that was not useful, Hussey said. Investigators decided the standard accident reconstruction should yield the information needed without the electronic data.

Police said the license of the likely driver, Gagnon, was suspended in 1997 after an accident and civil suit in Virginia. Officials in that state would release no details about the accident.

Police in Maine said Tuesday they are conducting special tests to be sure Gagnon was the driver. The crash was so violent that Gagnon and two other occupants were thrown from the vehicle.

"We're not putting a lot of emphasis on who was driving and who was sitting where. We believe she was driving, but we're trying not to put it too, too hard in stone," Hussey said.

One reason police believe Gagnon was driving is that witnesses say they saw her getting into the driver's seat while the SUV was pulled over two miles before the crash site, less than two minutes before it happened.

"We're very confident it was her, but we would like to obviously have something definitive from the crime lab if they were able to get it," McCausland said.

Evidence collection specialists planned to compare fibers found on the car's upholstery with the clothing worn by the occupants. The state medical examiner also will study the occupants' injuries for clues about where they were when the vehicle crashed.

Police have yet to receive the results of blood-alcohol tests that are required in fatal car accidents, and they also have sought blood tests to determine if any medications or drugs were involved.

Police believe only Saint Paulin and Deion Stuart were wearing seatbelts at the time of the crash.

Police have not aggressively pursued the reason behind the women's trip north, in part because they have not launched a criminal investigation.

"There is going to be no prosecution. It's more of finding out what was happening," Hussey said. Police were conducting interviews in Portland and planned to explore the possibility they were headed to Fort Kent, he said.

The situation is something of a mystery around Fort Kent.

At Rock's Diner, the restaurant where many of the locals go to eat, patrons talked about the situation Tuesday morning, but without much certainty. Some said they might know who the Internet acquaintance was, but most said they didn't.

Rumors, patrons said, get around quickly in a town, which has a population of just over 4,000.

"It's the first time I heard Fort Kent's involved," said Manzer Belanger, the town's postmaster, who read about the accident in a local newspaper. "And I would have heard about it."

In Carmel, where the accident happened, state troopers and local emergency personnel held a critical-incident debriefing Tuesday as part of the process for dealing with the psychological impact of the horrific accident scene and the children involved.

"Maybe they can just help us bring closure," said Carmel Fire Chief Joseph Pelletier.

Staff Writer Giselle Goodman contributed to this report.

Staff Writer David Hench can be contacted at 791-6327 or at: dhench@pressherald.com

Source