GRAFTON TOWNSHIP – Four youths from New Hampshire were injured in an early morning crash Saturday on Route 26 after the pickup truck they were in slammed into a tree, rolled and landed on its roof, police said.
Driver Jeremy N. Alonzo and Nicholas R. Morin, both 18 and of Berlin, Amanda M. Laflamme, 15, of Berlin, and Heather L. Laflamme, 15, of Dummer, and no relation, were taken in two Bethel Rescue ambulances to Androscoggin Valley Hospital in Berlin, Oxford County Deputy Chancey Libby said on Saturday afternoon.
A nursing supervisor said Saturday night that all had been treated and released.
“The whole front of the truck was just gone. The tree crushed everything into where the front axle is. Those kids are really lucky to be alive,” Libby said.
The accident is believed to have happened at least an hour before a cell phone caller discovered the wreck at 4:32 a.m. and alerted authorities, Libby said.
Alonzo was driving south on Route 26 in a 2005 GMC pickup. All four “were crammed in the front seat – the two girls in the middle – and none wearing safety belts, Libby said.
They were heading from Berlin to a friend’s house in Errol, N.H., but didn’t realize they had passed through Errol, and were well into Maine.
They came to a small bend in the road about a mile or two south of Screw Auger Falls, “driving way too fast for it. Speed was a major factor,” he added.
The truck reportedly slid off the road on black ice and slammed into the tree, hitting on the passenger-side corner of the front end. There were no signs of braking.
The truck rolled at least once, possibly twice, landing on the roof sideways in the southbound lane, with what was left of the nose of the truck in the opposite lane.
“Other than the grace of God, I don’t know what saved them. How Morin didn’t get his head crushed in, I don’t know. They were God-awful lucky, because the roof was crushed right down to where the head rests would be,” he added.
Libby said no one got ejected, because they were tightly packed inside, and the roof collapsed the passenger-side window down so far so quickly that no one would have been able to fit through it.
“If they had hit straight on, they probably all would have been heaved right out through the windshield. The airbags going off probably kept them from going out it,” he said.
The investigation is continuing, but the only charge against Alonzo at this time is for having too many in the front seat. The legal limit in Maine is three, but Libby said it depends on how many safety belts are in the truck.
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