PILOT MOUNTAIN — Freakish circumstances surrounding a race car falling from a trailer and causing a head-on collision with an oncoming vehicle on U.S. 52 are being blamed for the death of a Pinnacle man.
“It was a crazy mess,” First Sgt. J.M. Church of the N.C. Highway Patrol said Friday of the accident scene Thursday afternoon near Mile Marker 131 on the four-lane highway just north of Pilot Mountain State Park.
Officials were notified around 4:15 p.m. about the wreck that encompassed both the northbound and southbound portions of U.S. 52 and resulted in the death of James Corey Jefferson, 47.
A chain-reaction series of events unfolded as a 2003 Freightliner rollback wrecker driven by Billy Joe Cline, 44, of Rural Retreat, Virginia, was headed north while hauling a car. The truck also was towing a utility trailer with a race car on the back.
Straps securing the race car somehow came loose and it fell into the roadway in the path of a 2008 Nissan passenger car being driven by Tammy Harmon Moore, 53, of Mount Airy.
“It was one of those little dirt-track cars,” Church described, saying potential charges are pending against Cline after a review by the Surry County District Attorney’s Office.
All this transpired in the left northbound lane, continuing with the race car plowing through a guardrail, crossing the median and heading into southbound traffic, encountering a 2017 Ford passenger car containing Jefferson and his wife, Kimberly Dawn Jefferson, 42.
“And they hit head-on,” said the Highway Patrol spokesman, who added that James Corey Jefferson was killed on impact.
The race car resembled a bowling ball crashing into pins due to the momentum involved, said Amanda Mecomber, a Michigan woman who witnessed the incident while traveling a short distance behind the hauler en route from Fayetteville.
She said one of the passenger cars involved appeared to have been cut in half. “It was bad.”
Kimberly Dawn Jefferson suffered serious but non-life-threatening injuries and was transported to Wake Forest Baptist Hospital in Winston-Salem along with Moore, the woman in the first vehicle that collided with the race car.
Neither Cline nor a woman identified as his wife, Tammy Nunn, were injured.
Mecomber said witnessing the carnage unfold left her “just praying for the families, because it was pitiful.”
Southbound traffic on U.S. 52 was shut down completely for more than two hours after the incident, with northbound travel reduced to one lane for about 45 minutes. Vehicles also were rerouted onto Key Street at Pilot Mountain to avoid the scene.
A southbound traveler from Illinois told The Mount Airy News after 6 p.m. Thursday that the stranded motorists largely were being patient although some were backing up and heading onto the median in an attempt to leave the scene.
Trooper Terry Bullington investigated the accident.
All those involved were wearing seat belts.
Difficult to comprehend
First Sgt. Church said the Highway Patrol usually is focused on causative factors such as excessive speed or driver impairment — neither of which were involved Thursday afternoon — and developing statistics to help understand and prevent motor vehicle accidents.
But the one Thursday afternoon defies such analytics, he acknowledged.
Cline was certain that he had properly secured the race car, only to have it come loose for some unexplainable reason, Church said.
“There’s nothing we could have done to prevent that,” he said of precautionary measures promoted by the Highway Patrol. “It was just a horrific event.”
There is a bit of a silver lining concerning the notion that more vehicles, and fatalities, could have been involved during a busy travel time on U.S. 52.
“A miracle is what I would call it,” Church said.
Yet this does not offset the tragedy associated with the death of Jefferson in occupying a particular spot where his vehicle collided with the race car.
“Talk about being in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Church said.
Source: https://www.mtairynews.com
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