Double Fatal Accident Kills Two On Cemetary Road In Bowling Green, Kentucky. I Believe One Of The Young Men Is A Good Friend And Classmate Of One Of My Children, All The Way From Kindergarten. RIP.

Two killed in one-vehicle accident
Car catches fire after hitting tree
By DEBORAH HIGHLAND

Kentucky State Police Trooper Terry Alexander examines the scene of a single-vehicle accident this morning on Cemetery Road in Warren County. Two people were killed when the car left the road and hit a tree.

Two people died around 7 a.m. today when a vehicle they were in slammed into a tree in the 5400 block of Cemetery Road just outside the Bowling Green city limits.

The driver of a tan 2003 Chevrolet sedan with a Ballard County license plate failed to negotiate a 45-mph curve. Tire tracks indicate that the car was heading toward Bowling Green and ran off the road several yards before striking a tree line. The car then caught fire, Kentucky State Police Post 3 spokesman Trooper Jonathan Biven said.

The driver and passenger died at the scene. Their names were not released pending notification of the family.

A man who declined to give his name to the media ran for a fire extinguisher to try to fight the fire before firefighters could get to the scene. The man said the car was moving so fast that he never saw it as he was backing out of his driveway. He just saw blue smoke after the car crashed.

The impact with the tree was so hard that the car’s battery shot out of the car and into a neighboring yard. The entire front end of the car was crumpled like a piece of paper. The only part of the car that remained intact was the back seat area and trunk.

Wendell Rector responded to the scene with his bulldozer after a firefighter called him and asked if the department could use it to remove the car from the steep embankment where it came to rest. A tow truck was unable to pull the car up.

Rector hooked up a chain to his bulldozer and pulled the car to the road so that emergency workers could get to the car’s occupants.

At about 9:15 a.m., emergency responders, who had pulled metal and the car’s engine away from the passenger’s body, were able to remove the body from the vehicle. The car was placed on a flatbed tow truck and moved to the Alvaton Fire Station so emergency crews could work to remove the driver’s body. The body was freed from the wreckage at about 10:45 a.m.

Both occupants were wearing seat belts. Speed is a contributing factor to the wreck, Biven said.

“Most of the time when (drivers) hit this curve, I hear brakes,” said Rector’s wife, Faye Rector, who lives near the accident site at Hillcrest and Cemetery roads. “All there was this morning was a short screech and a huge crash.”

Faye Rector said the accident brought back a flood of memories of losing her brother in a single-car wreck in 1991.

“You think about the mothers, the brothers, the family. There’s nothing you can say or do to ease the agony they are going through,” Faye Rector said as her husband used the scoop on his bulldozer to help carry wreckage debris from the accident site up to a waiting tow truck.

“I know we as humans go our different ways but you let something like this happen ... you see people pull together,” she said.

In addition to her husband and the man who responded with a fire extinguisher, other neighbors carried buckets and coolers of water to the crash site, she said.

Rector asked state troopers at the scene to patrol the road more, she said.

“These people drive too fast on this road,” she said.