On Sunday, April, 25, around 2:40 a.m., a 2000 Oldsmobile Bravada SUV driven by Josh Netzel, 24 of Sandstone, was traveling east-bound on Hwy. 95 when it collided with a 1998 Pontiac Grand Am, driven by Schumacher, heading west-bound.
The accident occurred on Hwy. 95, just west of the Cambridge Rum River Bridge.
Travis Buchan, 17, of Cambridge; Kelsee Blackledge, 15, of Isanti; Tres Kendryna-Whitefeather, 16, of Cambridge and Travis Gryczkowski, 21, of Cambridge, all passengers in the Grand Am, were killed.
Both Netzel and his passenger, Aaron Neuschwander, 23, of Mora, were also killed. The Bravada SUV burst into flames upon impact.
The driver, SeBrina Schumacher, is now in satisfactory condition at Hennepin County Medical Center.
The family released a statement through HCMC that said, “The family of SeBrina Schumacher confirms that they’ve been notified of the results of the blood alcohol test that was taken at Cambridge Medical Center. According to the test, there was no alcohol in her system at the time of the crash.”
These excerpts are from the Isant County News about the recent accident that captivated the attention of the State of Minnesota. The community of Cambridge woke up that Sunday morning finding out that four high school students driving a Pontiac from CIHS were dead along with two men in their twenties driving an SUV. The only survivor was a student who was sixteen, she had recently passed her driving test and was now reported to be in a comma. Speculation of drunk driving surfaced right away about the students because an officer on the scene had smelled liquor from the crashed car.
The wind of stories whipped around Cambridge as the unfolding of the identities came forth. Toxicology reports were being done on all involved. The news stations from the Twin Cities got involved with a discussion of why the students were not using seat belts and how come the 16 year old female was driving that many people after curfew. The focus was mainly on the students. More trepidation began when it was reported by EMT’s that in all their years they had never seen such a horrific accident. The mourning vigil of the young people and family started with signing poster boards and hanging flowers at the crash site. These actions filled our TV local news and captivated our local highway. The communities heart sank as they watched everything unfold and knowing that the local prom was less than a week away. Speculation occurred whether the teens now had learned from this heartbreak.
Cambridge had done its mock drills and the local EMT’s did do a program about driving and drinking weeks before for the CIHS student body. They were not lax in the warning and were dismayed that state critics would think that they were not educating the teens on teen survival subjects. The school and community got on their haunches and proclaimed they had been proactive and had done their job. The parents of the deceased kids were saying to reporters that it was just an accident and not to lay blame on anyone. Nobody wanted to be blamed for this devastation.
The fault turned out to be the drivers of the SUV. They were the ones that were drinking without a designated driver. It was reported that they had been at a birthday party in Cambridge that afternoon and were already drunk at that time. At the accident site they had landed on top of their SUV and were caught in a fiery blaze; there was not enough left of them to even do a toxicology report but the sighting of them at various places that day confirmed they were intoxicated. Schumacher also relayed days later that they had crossed the centerline.
It was about 2:40 am when they crossed over centerline and hit the car with the kids. No one was wearing their seat belt except the young 16 year old Schumacher who was the designated driver of the Pontiac. She was spared, although the way the SUV had hit the Pontiac, seatbelts may not have changed the outcome of the accident. The only thing that may have changed the outcome of this accident would be those two young men would had their own designated driver then this story may never have occurred.
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