A driver’s failure to heed a stop sign was blamed for the deaths of four persons in an auto-truck collision at the intersection of State Routes 67 and 9 at the south edge of Good Hope at 10 o’clock Saturday.
Two burned to death. Crushing injuries caused the deaths of the two others. Three who occupied a second car were injured not seriously.
The dead: Truman Schisler of Bushnell and his son, Truman Johnson of Petersburg and Arthur Kelly Miller of San Jose. The latter two were burned to death. Schisler’s death was due to a skull fracture. His son suffered a broken neck and a skull fracture.
Police said that Schisler, eastward bound in his car, failed to observe a stop sign warning and that his machine crashed into the side of the truck in which Johnson and Miller were riding. The truck was overturned and was almost immediately enveloped in flames which trapped the occupants.
The truck, out of control after the collision, and before it overturned, sideswiped a car carrying Mrs. B. H. Watson of Monmouth, and Mrs. Carl Pierce and her daughter, Louise of Macomb. The three women were removed to a Macomb hospital but later returned to their homes having sustained only minor injuries.
Johnson and Miller were returning from the Iowa State Fair, where they had exhibited seed corn.
Mrs. Watson said she recovered consciousness shortly after the crash and that the truck was ablaze when she realized what had happened. Carl Pierce, riding in a machine about one quarter of a mile back of the car in which his wife and daughter were riding arrived at the scene a moment or more after the collision and told police officers later that the truck was a flaming mass of wreckage and that he was unable to get near enough to learn whether or not the occupants had been trapped. He was unable to see the bodies, he said, and learned of the death of the two men only after the blaze had been extinguished.
The truck was traveling south out of Good Hope, and Schisler car east from Blandinsville to Macomb.
Schisler was the son of Mr. and Mrs. Harvey Schisler. He was employed in a Bushnell poultry house.
Current Obituaries in the Astoria South Fulton Argus