Three Colchester men and one Adair man were killed shortly after 7 o’clock Friday morning when a speeding Santa Fe passenger train struck their car at a crossing at the east edge of Lomax.
The body of the automobile, a new Ford, was carried over a half mile on the front of the locomotive.
The dead were:
Gerald William (Bill) Renner, 33, Colchester, a driver in recent stock car races in Macomb.
Vernon Halligan, 38, Colchester.
John Heikes, 42, Colchester.
Howard Brooks, 31, Adair.
Heikes owned the car and presumably was the driver. All were dead when train crew members reached them.
Renner’s body fell or was thrown from the car before the car was tossed to the side of the right of way from the front of the locomotive. The body was 100 yards west of the smashed car. The other bodies were still in the car. The men, all in work clothing, were enroute to Gulfport where they were employed.
It was “like a truck hitting a cat at 70 miles an hour,” said Robert L. Barker, truck driver of Mexico, Mo., who witnessed the accident.
Barker, headed south, stopped on the north side of the track as the train, the Santa Fe’s fast Super Chief, approached from the west. Barker saw the car approaching from the south at what he regarded as a good, but not excessive, rate of speed. The train smashed broadside into the car and carried it away.
Barker was of the opinion that freight cars on a siding obscured the vision of the driver of the death car. However, he said the train whistled a warning as it sped toward the crossing.
The car was demolished and torn to bits. The main portion of it was flattened to about half its normal width. The front end, including the frame, was sheared off just in front of the dash. The engine was hurled out of the car and thrown down an embankment and over a fence, landing about 125 feet from the crossing.
Lomax residents who rushed to the scene, said that the train stopped with the rear end of its eight or ten cars near the place where the main part of the car was tossed aside.
Trainmen rushed back to check the accident, they said. The trainmen and others carried the bodies from the car and placed them on the top of the embankment. Then they were taken away on handcars to the Stronghurst funeral home.
Current Obituaries in the Astoria South Fulton Argus