One moment, the residential street in west suburban Riverside was quiet. The next, the terrible din of twisting metal filled the night air and shook nearby homes.
“We were sitting in the front room, and it sounded like a jet was crashing,” said Cary Jan, 49.
The scene Saturday night outside Jan’s house shocked him. What he realized later was that the back end of a compact car, mangled and crushed, lay overturned at the base of a tree in his front yard. About 100 feet down the street, the front end rested against another tree, smashed. Jan rushed to look for survivors.
The 17-year-old driver and the front-seat passenger, both seniors at Morton West High School in Berwyn, survived. Two teenage passengers in the back seat, another Morton West student and a graduate, did not.
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The crash brought the toll of teenagers dying in car crashes in the Chicago area to six in less than 24 hours. A collision Friday night in Blue Island killed four teenagers on their way to a bowling alley.
On Sunday, Riverside police were trying to determine what caused the crash Saturday night in the 200 block of East Burlington Street that killed Stanley Joray, 18, of Berwyn and Adam Tebockhorst, 16, of Lyons; preliminary investigation strongly suggested that speed was a factor.
“We believe the vehicle was traveling far in excess of the posted 25 m.p.h. speed limit,” Assistant Police Chief Tom Weitzel said. He said police estimate that the driver was going between 80 and 100 m.p.h. and may have been racing and trying to pass two teenage friends in another car.
The fatal crash came just days after Secretary of State Jesse White promised to push new legislation for teen drivers that would make Illinois’ licensing system one of the most stringent in the country. The new law would triple the length of time a teen must hold a learner’s permit, tighten night-driving restrictions and make teen drivers wait longer before being allowed to drive with other unrelated teens.
It also would require students to get six hours of behind-the-wheel instruction from a certified instructor, compared with the two hours or less many young drivers receive now, according to a 2006 Tribune investigation.
Weitzel said police were canvassing the neighborhood for witnesses to the accident; all the emergency calls officials received were from neighbors who heard the crash and saw its aftermath.
He said that there was no indication drugs or alcohol were involved and that all four occupants of the car were wearing seat belts. Police were awaiting a report from the Cook County sheriff’s police’s accident reconstruction unit to have a more exact estimate of the car’s speed.
Friends say car wasn’t speeding
Detectives have interviewed the two teenagers who were in the other car. Those teens, who were not hurt, told police that the two-car caravan was headed to a nearby mall and said the two cars were not traveling at excessive speeds, Weitzel said.
“They’re cooperative, but we have to wait to see if their statements will match up with the physical evidence at the scene,” he said.
In Illinois and nationwide, speed is the leading factor in fatal teen crashes, more so than drunken driving and refusal to wear seat belts. It was blamed in crashes that killed 133 teens in Illinois from 2003 to 2005. Nationally, speed was involved in more than a third of all fatal accidents involving teens in 2004.
At an apartment in the 7800 block of Ogden Avenue in Lyons, Tebockhorst’s mother declined to speak about her son’s death.
A friend and classmate said he was a friendly, outgoing boy who, like Joray, loved to tinker with cars.
“He did well in school; he was really creative,” said Marco Evidente, 18, a senior at Morton West who knew Tebockhorst, a junior, since the younger boy was in 7th grade. “He was really into music.”
A neighbor, Jasmina Marjanovic, burst into tears upon learning of Tebockhorst’s death. “I’ve known him since he was a boy this high,” she said, putting her hand about 3 feet from the floor.
Evidente said Joray graduated from Morton West last year, though he wasn’t sure if his friend was working.
No one answered the door at Joray’s home in the 2500 block of South Euclid Avenue in Berwyn, where a next-door neighbor said he lived with his father, who also is named Stanley. Reached by phone in Nevada, Joray’s mother, Eleanor, declined to comment.
The neighbor, Annette Martin, said Joray moved to the neighborhood with his family when he was about 6. A few years later, the boy moved to Nevada to live with his mother for several years before returning to Berwyn for high school, Martin said.
“He was a mechanic; he was always messing around with cars in his garage,” she said.
Glass embedded in bark
Police said the car was headed east on Burlington about 9 p.m. Saturday, when the driver tried to pass the other car and lost control. The car went airborne, police said, and its passenger side slammed into the tree in Jan’s front yard, which on Sunday still had shards of auto glass embedded in its bark. Weitzel said the vehicle was about 8 feet above the ground at the point of impact.
Emergency medical personnel arrived within minutes and took the driver to Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood, where she remained Sunday. Weitzel said the teen, who received her driver’s license in October 2005 and lives at the same Lyons address at which the car is registered, had not spoken with detectives yet.
News of crash spread quickly
Jan said that when he ran outside, the front-seat passenger, an 18-year-old from Lyons who was bleeding from a gash in his head, was already out of the car, pacing in circles, wailing.
“The boy started freaking out, saying, `Help my friend, help my friend,'” Jan said.
As for the car, Jan said, “You didn’t even know what you were looking at.”
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Police spent 20 minutes prying open the wreckage to extricate Tebockhorst and Joray.
Evidente said news of the crash spread quickly by mobile phone through friends in his social circle. He said he went with the father of the driver to the scene about 20 minutes after the crash and was horrified: He had never seen a car split in two.
“I was like in shock. I couldn’t believe what just happened,” he said.
On the block Sunday, one neighbor moved a basketball-size stone apparently thrown out of place in the collision back to its place by the side of his driveway. Cars on the two-lane street slowed as passengers craned their necks.
Though Jan said the minutes in the wake of the crash were terrifying, he was most surprised by what happened hours later.
About 2:30 a.m., Jan said, the front-seat passenger–his head bandaged and accompanied by his mother–was in front of the house again, picking up some of his belongings that lay scattered on the lawn.
When Jan spoke to him, the teen sobbed and thanked Jan for coming to his aid.
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IN THE WEB EDITION
Read the Tribune’s special report on teen driving fatalities at chicagotribune.com