Updated at 7:42 p.m.
He could be goofy and always wanted to make people smile. She could brighten anyone’s mood within a matter of seconds.
Logan Cota, of Newport, and Taylor Warren, of Lunenburg, both 18, were killed Wednesday night on Route 105 in Charleston when an oncoming vehicle crossed into the opposite lane, striking the teenagers’ vehicle head-on, according to Vermont State Police.
Warren “was the sweetest, most caring person someone could ever know,” said her close friend, Gracie Redding, 16, of Whitefield, New Hampshire.
In an exchange of Facebook messages Thursday with VTDigger, Redding said Warren was always helping people, stating she had become best friends with Warren years ago when they were together in school.
“Everyone bullied me for the simplest things,” Redding wrote, “but she stood out, and was my friend for no reason.”
Cota enjoyed riding around in his Toyota Tundra pickup, working out on a farm, hunting, fishing and making people laugh, said his mother, Deanna Maryea-Cota, of Newport.
“He was a free spirit and liked living life to the fullest,” she said.
Her son, she said, liked being a “country boy.”
“He had this quirky, beautiful smile all the time,” Maryea-Cota said. “He liked joking around and making people laugh.”
She said her son and Warren, who she described as a “real spitfire,” had been dating for about a month.
Kylie Ovitt, 19, of Derby, described Cota as the best friend she ever had.
“He was a very big teddy bear,” Ovitt said in an interview Thursday. “He had piss and vinegar in him, I would say, and he had a very good attitude on a lot of things, but he had a very big heart.”
Ovitt said whenever she was having a bad night, Cota would text her and then take her out for a drive on the backroads in a beat-up pickup.
“He was always just a phone call away,” Ovitt said.
Maryea-Cota and Ovitt traveled to the crash scene late Thursday afternoon where they placed a cross bearing the names of the teens killed in the crash.
Cota was driving to a friend’s house Wednesday night when the crash happened, according to Ovitt.
Vermont State Police responded to the crash around 8:45 p.m. on Wednesday, they said in a news release.
Police said an investigation indicated that Katelyn Deslandes, 23, of Island Pond, was driving a 2013 Chevrolet Malibu west on Route 105. A 2011 Hyundai Sonata, driven by Cota, was traveling east, according to the release, with Warren in the passenger seat.
Deslandes drove left of center into the eastbound lane, striking the Sonata head-on, according to police.
Cota was taken by ambulance to North Country Hospital where he died of his injuries.
Warren was pronounced dead at the scene, police said.
Deslandes suffered “significant but non-life threatening injuries,” police said. She was initially taken to North Country Hospital in Newport, before being flown by helicopter to Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, New Hampshire.
None of the individuals in either vehicle was wearing a seatbelt at the time of the crash, police said.
The crash closed the roadway for almost four hours, according to the press release, and the Vermont State Police Crash Reconstruction Team responded to the scene to help in the investigation.
Police, in the release issued early Thursday morning, said the investigation into the crash was in its “infancy” and remained ongoing. There were no new updates Thursday afternoon, according to state police spokesperson Adam Silverman.
Despite an inquiry from VTDigger, police declined to identify Cota or Warren on Thursday morning, citing a state law that prevents them from releasing the names of juveniles, which in Vermont includes 18-year-olds. But in a press release sent at about 7:15 p.m., police reversed course, releasing their names.
