[E]mily McCormack shudders when she thinks it might not have been a matter of if someone was going to die on Interstate 89 Saturday night, but a matter of when, and whom it would be.
A wrong-way driver in a dark pickup truck slammed head-on into a sedan full of Harwood Union High School kids just before midnight, killing all five in the car.
McCormack, 17, who lives in Morristown, came up on the crash moments after it happened. The Peoples Academy senior was the first on the scene, and witnessed the horrific events that followed.
“It could have been us. It could have been someone from my high school,” McCormack said Sunday. “A girl from Stowe we know had been dancing and talking with one of the Harwood kids that night.”
The I-89 southbound lanes were busy as carloads of area high schoolers headed home from a Mike Stud concert in South Burlington. The hip-hop artist drew teenagers from all over the northern half of Vermont.
“Our friends were a couple of minutes ahead of us, and there were other cars all headed the same way,” McCormack said.
She was driving one of those cars and narrowly missed becoming a casualty in the wreck. Somehow, she saw the pickup truck facing the wrong way, in the middle of the road, dark-colored and blending in with that deep lightless sky so common on Vermont’s nighttime highways.
She swerved around the truck, crunching through a metal-and-plastic debris field, and immediately had her passenger, Ashley Hill, call 911.
“If you hadn’t seen that truck, you would have hit it,” she said. “The truck was just sitting there, still.”
Even though she had pulled over, she and Hill didn’t feel safe at first, afraid that every time headlights appeared in her rear-view mirror, someone would hit the pickup truck.
“I kept holding my breath when cars came up behind me,” she said.
It was eerily quiet at the scene, as she got acclimated to the dark and still night. The Volkswagen with the Harwood students was over the bank, already smoking, about to catch fire.
Then a man pulled over — McCormack said “he was, really, the hero of the whole night” — and went down over the bank to see if he could help.
McCormack was there when the first police car, a Williston Police Department SUV, arrived at the crash, and the officer went down to the burning car. She was there when his cruiser suddenly took off down I-89. And she was there when it returned.
More and more people had stopped at the accident, flashing lights cutting through the darkness, crowding the road. It was chaos.
Suddenly the police cruiser came flying back up the road, again going the wrong way. With nowhere left to go, it slammed into the very same pickup truck that had started the whole chain of events, and immediately caught fire.
“I was on the phone with my dad, and this police car shot up over the hill, going really fast, and slammed nonstop into the truck,” McCormack said. “The sound of it was insane. I was shaking. I was very upset about it.”
McCormack said the man she met earlier — she got only his last name, Porter — also saw the crash coming and had just enough time to throw himself down onto the pavement, and the police car skimmed right over him, running over his ankle.
Despite all that, McCormack said, the man wanted to continue to help, but then surrendered to the shock of it, the sights and sounds and brush with two tons of metal.
“He was so lucky. He stared death right in the face,” McCormack said.
McCormack didn’t know the Harwood teens personally, but she knew of them. It’s that way with high schools in the area, when there’s maybe one degree of separation, and she knows teens at Peoples Academy are going through all kinds of “what-if” scenarios.
How many cars narrowly missed a collision with the pickup truck before the crash? How many people didn’t see the truck just sitting there, dark on dark, and still managed to drive past it? How many swerved to miss it?
McCormack is in the Peoples Academy community service club, and she hopes to rally her fellow students to do something — a moment of silence, a card mailing to Harwood families, a coming-together to try to understand what happened.
“The hardest thing we’re dealing with is not understanding — why does it happen like this?” she said. “That guy was in two crashes and he was just injured, and those five students passed away because of his actions.”
