Seven die in car crash near Carmel

CARMEL – The worst car accident in more than 45 years on a public Maine road killed seven people, including three children under age 10, Sunday afternoon when a rented sport utility vehicle rolled over on Interstate 95 northbound near mile marker 171.

Maine State Police identified the victims as three adult females, two small girls, a small boy and another male, believed to be a teenager, said spokesman Stephen McCausland. He also confirmed that the vehicle was rented in Maine earlier that day and that the renter was a Maine resident.

McCausland added that investigators were fairly certain the renter was one of the victims and the other adults also were from Maine. He said he hoped investigators would be able to make identifications by early today and then determine and notify next of kin.

State police Sgt. Thomas Perkins Jr. said that at about 2:45 p.m. a green Ford Explorer traveling at a high rate of speed came up behind a car in the passing lane. Another car was in the travel lane, Perkins said, so the SUV passed both vehicles in the breakdown lane. The SUV then veered back into traffic, clipped one of the other vehicles and flipped over, Perkins said, ending up in a patch of trees in the median separating the northbound and southbound lanes.

Several state police units, officers from the Penobscot County Sheriff’s Department and rescue crews sifted through the wreckage while blue tarps hid the vehicles and bodies from sight. The SUV had come to rest on its roof. Only tires and axles were visible under the tarps. Several trees had been knocked down near the vehicle, and large sections of bark were stripped from others. Skid marks from the Explorer started in the right-hand travel lane some 100 feet before the point where the SUV left the road.

As a state police official instructed local television crews and bystanders to remain at a distance, investigators removed the tarps to assess the scene and begin removing victims. Initially, state police reported the death total at five. McCausland said three of the vehicle’s passengers, two women and a child, were ejected from the vehicle, while two others, believed to be an adult and a child, were found inside. However, when firefighters cut down trees in an effort to turn the vehicle right side up and remove the bodies, two more – believed to be a child and a teenager – were found in the SUV. Preliminary investigation suggested that at least some of the occupants were not wearing seat belts, Perkins said.

Perkins said one of the victims, a young girl, was administered CPR for several hours but that the rest were dead at the scene.

Officials questioned the drivers of the other two cars involved and Perkins said he advised the witnesses not to comment to anyone else. One witness, a young woman, kneeled near the scene of the accident with her head in her hands and wept openly as an officer questioned her.

State police allowed cars to pass the accident scene until investigators arrived, then closed the northbound lanes, backing up traffic as far south as Newport. Police eventually rerouted northbound traffic to the southbound lanes through a turnaround not far from the scene of the accident. McCausland said traffic had lessened considerably in the early evening hours, and at about 10 p.m. I-95 reopened.

The bodies were removed from the scene and taken to Brookings-Smith Funeral Home in Bangor, said McCausland. The SUV was taken to the state police crime lab, and investigators were convening in Bangor Sunday night to continue with the identification process. McCausland added that photos recovered from the vehicle might be helpful in identifying the victims.

The crash was the deadliest on a Maine public road since seven occupants of a car were killed when it was broadsided and run over by a tractor-trailer in Richmond on Sept. 5, 1958. The state’s worst crash occurred on a privately owned logging road on Sept. 12, 2002, when 14 migrant workers perished in a van that went off a bridge into the Allagash Wilderness Waterway.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.