HANCOCK – Another motor vehicle accident shook Hancock County on Tuesday morning, where police and fire officials sifted through a crash on Route 1 that took the life of a local woman.

Wendy Brown, 39, of Hancock suffered massive head trauma and died at the scene of an accident involving her SUV, a station wagon and a box truck hauling lobsters.

It was the eighth car accident in Hancock County involving a fatality since the end of May, half of which have involved commercial trucks.

Maine State Police Trooper Miles Carpenter said Brown was driving a 2005 Ford Expedition south on Route 1 just after 8 a.m. Tuesday when she put on her blinker to turn into the Hancock Grocery.

The Expedition was stopped for about seven seconds, Carpenter said, when a 1999 Saab station wagon slammed into it from behind. The collision propelled the Expedition into the northbound lane of Route 1 directly into the path of the lobster truck.

Carpenter said Brown was wearing a seat belt and the air bags in her vehicle deployed, but the woman was dead by the time rescue personnel arrived.

Rosamond McLean, 61, of Sullivan, who was driving the Saab, suffered neck and back injuries and was taken by ambulance to Maine Coast Memorial Hospital in Ellsworth. Carpenter said McLean was later transferred to a Bangor hospital, but her injuries were not considered life threatening.

The truck driver, Glenn Kennedy, 48, of Sherman, was treated at Maine Coast Memorial and then released, the trooper said.

The accident is still under investigation, which will take some time since it involves a commercial vehicle, Carpenter said.

“It appears, preliminarily, that the Expedition was hit at enough of an angle to send it into the path of the box truck,” the trooper said at the scene. “At this point, there are no signs that the Saab applied its brakes.”

Police are still determining why McLean didn’t see Brown’s vehicle. It was not clear whether charges would be filed.

The accident closed a lengthy stretch of Route 1 for several hours Tuesday morning and into the afternoon. Cars heading east from Ellsworth were rerouted on Route 182 and Route 200 through Franklin and Sullivan.

The truck hauling lobsters had significant front-end damage and had to be unloaded to another truck. The other vehicles also were damaged substantially.

The five fatal accidents handled by the Hancock County Sheriff’s Department so far this summer are an average number, according to Sheriff William Clark.

“It certainly has been busy, but it hasn’t been excessive for us,” he said, though he admitted that crashes involving large vehicles seem to be on the rise.

“Some of it may be coincidence, though. I don’t think there are any more of those [trucks] on the roads than there used to be.”

Even though Tuesday’s accident in Hancock was not caused by the box truck, it’s possible that Brown would still be alive if her SUV had collided with another car, Clark said.

Earlier this month, a woman was killed in Bucksport after her car collided with a dump truck.

On July 19, a Machias man was killed after he fell asleep at the wheel and drifted across the centerline into the path of a tractor-trailer. That accident also occurred on Route 1 in Hancock.

And on July 16 on Route 9 in Amherst, a dump truck driver lost control of his rig and rolled it over, pinning him inside.

Just last week on Route 1A in Ellsworth, two people were killed in a collision that left the couple’s three children without parents.

Clark said it’s not just fatal accidents either. Several other serious accidents have been reported in the county.

“We were wondering if our lack of doing selective enforcement, that is setting up and running radar or doing road checks, is causing people to feel that there’s no presence out there,” he said. “The fact is, we just don’t have the time to do it.”