Newport High School Principal Jocelyn Hess was on her way home following the school’s homecoming dance on Saturday night when she saw headlights coming straight at her.
For a second, she thought she might be driving the wrong direction on U.S. Route 22. It was pitch black along that section of the four-lane highway. But then she saw the eastbound vehicles in front of her swerve to the right.
She followed suit, just in the nick of time to avoid the westbound pickup truck barreling towards her in the eastbound lane at speeds far in excess of the 70 mph she was driving.
“It took me a minute and I’m like, I need to call 911,” Hess said.
Hess made that call at 10:38 p.m., the same time the man driving the truck heading in the wrong direction slammed into another eastbound vehicle causing a fiery crash about three-quarters of a mile west of the Mountain Road exit in Middle Paxton Township, according to state police.
The crash killed the wrong-way driver and seriously injured the driver and passenger in the vehicle he struck, police said. All were transported to hospitals, where the pickup truck driver died. The other driver and passenger suffered life-threatening injuries.
Condition updates and their names were not released Sunday by state police.
According to witness accounts, the driver of the pickup traveled west at least 6 miles in the eastbound lanes.
Sydney McCoy of Hummelstown saw the speeding truck coming at her family’s car in the left lane near the Fishing Creek exit as they were making their way home from the Port Royal Speedway. Her mother was driving. Her step-dad in the backseat saw the headlights coming toward them and yelled her mom’s name.
“She yelled, ‘Oh my God, he’s going the wrong way,” McCoy said, and quickly swerved into the right lane. By the time McCoy turned around, the truck had passed the vehicle behind them.
McCoy called 911 at 10:35 p.m. “I knew there was going to be a crash,” she said.
Another witness, 23-year-old Anya Vaughn of Ellicott City, also had a near-miss with that truck. She was in the eastbound lanes about to pass a truck that had slowed down in front of her, not knowing that it was slowing down because of the wrong-way driver.
“I saw headlights coming my way,” she said.
Vaughn realized it just in time to pull back behind the truck she was following. The she saw police and ambulances with sirens blaring pass by a short time later.
With a concrete barrier separating eastbound and westbound lanes, Vaughn said she did not know how the truck got into her lane, but said she was shocked to see it.
So was Hess, who said where the truck passed her, the eastbound and westbound lanes of U.S. 22 separate and are on different elevations. She said she was trying to figure out where the driver got on the wrong exit ramp to enter the eastbound lanes.
“I still can’t get my brain around that,” Hess said. “If the driver was on something, it did not appear they were swerving. They were just speeding down the wrong lane. They were going the wrong direction. I was hoping he or she wasn’t going to hit somebody.”
Staff writer Steve Marroni contributed to this story.
Jan Murphy may be reached at jmurphy@pennlive.com. Follow her on Twitter at @JanMurphy.