KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The victim in Friday’s deadly crash involving two semi tractor-trailers and a pickup truck on Interstate 70 has been identified as a 60-year-old Parkville woman.
The truck and one of the semis were on eastbound I-70 shortly after 7:30 a.m. near mile-marker 412 when a sideswipe triggered a deadly sequence, according to a Kansas Highway Patrol Online Crash Log.
After the truck hit the semi on the right side, the semi hit the inside barrier dividing the eastbound and westbound lanes.
A westbound semi driven by Sherri Wheeler, 60, then struck the semi after it hit the median barrier.
Wheeler died in the crash, which closed I-70 for several hours Friday.
The driver of the pickup truck was taken to the hospital with a “suspected minor injury,” while the driver of the eastbound semi was taken to a different hospital with a “suspected serious injury,” according to the crash log.
KSHB 41 News spoke with Wheeler's best friend, Debora Scott, who lives in Texas.
“It didn’t matter if it was three in the morning or two in the afternoon," Scott said.
Scott says making time was never the issue for she and Wheeler. The pair met on Wheeler's 21st birthday.
“We were just inseparable from then on," she said. “We went out together we went dancing we did everything.”
Scott said Wheeler was a semi-truck driver for more than two decades and before that, a Lawton police officer.
“I worried more about her when she was a police officer," she said. “She was very conscientious about everything. She followed the rules, that stems from becoming a police officer, she always followed the rules no matter what anybody else did.”
Scott shared a message to others on the road.
“Leave your phones alone because you don’t know what you’re going to do," she said. "You being on the phone, or talking or texting, makes you a distracted driver and that effects other people."
