One of the college students was from Michigan. The car carrying the three Alpha Xi Delta members, ages 19 to 21, and two other sorority sisters hit the wrong-way vehicle overnight on a rise in Interstate 75 south of Toledo, just miles from Bowling Green State University, which they all attended. The two survivors were seriously injured.
Sixteen sorority sisters were heading to the Detroit airport in different cars as they tried to make a 5:30 a.m. flight, a friend said. Another vehicle carrying five of the students narrowly avoided the wrong-way driver, Ohio state troopers said.
“I don’t think the college girls ever saw it coming — nothing they could have done to avoid the crash,” Wood County Sheriff Mark Wasylyshyn said.
The wrong-way driver, Winifred D. Lein, 69, of Perrysburg, Ohio, was traveling alone and was pronounced dead at the scene, authorities said. Investigators are looking into why she was driving on the wrong side of the divided highway, and 911 and police radio traffic indicate she had been heading the wrong direction for at least seven miles.
“The college girls apparently did nothing wrong,” Wasylyshyn said.
Killed were Rebekah Blakkolb, 20, a junior from Aurora, Ohio; Christina Goyett, 19, a sophomore from Bay City, who was studying teacher education; and Sarah Hammond, 21, a junior from Yellow Springs, Ohio, majoring in apparel merchandising, the university said.
Goyett was excited about her first trip to the Dominican Republic, said Dee Bishop, a family friend in Bay City. She was a graduate of John Glenn High School.
“She was an absolutely wonderful, positive, happy person,” Bishop said.
She had just visited with her family Thursday at a surprise birthday party for her mother, Robyn, at a Bay City restaurant, then had driven back several hours south to the campus.
Students dropped off flowers and held one another outside the sorority house in Bowling Green, a stately brick building with a columned porch and white shutters.
