19-year-old Amish woman killed after truck crashes into horse-drawn buggy
A 19-year-old Amish woman was killed Monday after a tractor-trailer truck crashed into the horse-drawn buggy she was riding in.
The occupants of the buggy — siblings Samuel King, 30, and Fannie S. King, 19 — were ejected from the ”Amish open-style buggy” in the crash, which occurred just after 3 a.m. on Wisconsin Highway 81 in Darlington after the truck crashed into the cart from behind, the Lafayette County Sheriff’s Office said in a news release.
Fannie King was pronounced dead at the scene while Samuel King, who sustained serious injuries, was transported to Memorial Hospital of Lafayette County in an ambulance before he was flown by Med Flight to University Hospital in Madison, about 60 miles east.
The horse was also killed and the buggy was “demolished.” The truck’s driver, identified by the sheriff’s office as Pavel Ivanovich Gritskan, 39, of Broken Arrow, Okla., was not injured.
Lafayette County Sheriff Reg Gill told News 3 Now the siblings were likely traveling back to Darlington after a Sunday gathering in nearby Platteville, about 24 miles west. He added that the buggy had LED lights but investigators were determining whether the lights were operable.
A stretch of the highway was closed for almost seven hours on Monday before the road was fully reopened.
The Wisconsin State Patrol’s technical reconstruction unit is assisting the sheriff’s office with the crash investigation.
Crashes involving automobiles and horse-drawn buggies are not uncommon in rural areas. In 2019, three Amish children were killed after a drunk driver hit a carriage in Michigan. A similar crash occurred in the state several months later, killing three children who were on their way home from school. Two people were killed in Virginia in 2021 after a buggy was rear-ended by a pickup truck.
