Six girls between the ages of 1 and 18 were ejected from a vehicle and killed in a horrific crash along a Tennessee highway. The fatal crash occurred around 2:00 am Sunday morning on I-24 near Springfield, located just north of Nashville.
In total, two cars and nine victims were reported to be on the scene as first responders reacted to the devastation. One vehicle, a Toyota Camry, was found flipped over and seven of the eight occupants had been “ejected” from the car. The six dead children were among those who were found on the road, as well as an older adult female, who was transported to nearby Vanderbilt University Medical Center in serious condition. An adult male, the presumed driver of the Camry, was found in the vehicle and suffered only minor injuries as well.
NBC summarized the fatal crash, writing:
Six girls, ages 1 to 18, were believed to have died after they were ejected from the vehicle, the department said. Their exact ages were not immediately clear.
Two adults were also injured, one of them a woman who was critically hurt after appearing to have also been thrown from the vehicle, the department said. The woman was flown by air ambulance to the Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville. A man who said he had been in the vehicle also suffered minor injuries and was taken to TriStar Skyline Trauma Center in Nashville.
In response to the tragedy, Robertson County Emergency Medical Services Director/Chief Brent Dyer begged those willing to heed his advice to properly restrain themselves and their loved ones in cars.
“I beg people to put your children in the proper restraint devices,” he said, adding “and I beg everyone driving on the road to think about the outcome of impatience and the outcome of intolerance.”
Though an investigation is still underway, and few details of the cause of the crash have been released, Dyer’s warning hints at the possibility of road rage. Two male drivers, in separate vehicles, on a presumably empty road at 2:00 am on a Sunday morning, found themselves in a deadly accident.
No toxicology reports have been released as of this writing.
As stupid as getting bent out of shape on the road is, the idea that a driver (the father of the children?) would put the lives of his children at risk by first not buckling them in, and seemingly putting the younger ones on the laps of the older kids, before engaging in reckless behavior is beyond comprehension.
Dyer continued with his statements, saying that what he and his team encountered was something never meant to be seen by other people.
“These are things sometimes I don’t believe people are necessarily meant to see as human beings,” he commented, adding that the fact they could not save young people made the work doubly difficult. “It’s one of the hardest things we’ll ever do, as anybody in emergency services, is to realize that you can’t do something for a child.”
“Something like this would shock anybody. We are still human,” Dyer continued. “They [children] are the pure innocence of this world laying there and you want to do as much as you can for them.”
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