A semi driver was killed and his 8-year-old daughter and two other people were injured when the truck hit a car and then slammed into a home in south suburban Calumet City, authorities said.
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Joseph Foster 37, of Talmo, Ga. was killed in the accident, which occurred just before midnight Thursday near Torrence Avenue and Michigan City Road. His daughter, as well as a man and a woman in the car, suffered minor injuries. No one in the home was hurt.
The driver of the car, Tyler Weightman, 18, said he and his 20-year-old sister were coming home after Bible study when the semi drifted into his lane.
“As I was driving on Michigan City Road, I saw the semi start to drift into my lane,” Weightman told WGN-TV this morning. “I said, ‘Woa, what is he doing? Like is he going to move? What’s going on?’ I start slowing down, I try to stop and I just see him come after me. So I’m just sitting there, watching him about to crash into me. So we crash and we spin around and then I hear the trailer fall on the back of the car.
“Me and my sister were safe. We crawled out,” he said.
Weightman said he had just left a youth group where everyone dressed as zombies to show how “God made us alive.”
“I believe it was truly God that saved us,” he said. “So many things could have happened. The trailer could have hit in the front. I thank God so much.”
Don and Valerie Hartkorn said they were awaken by a blast that shook their home.
“I heard a screeching of brakes and then I heard a bang and then the whole house exploded,” Don Hartkorn said. “It was pitch dark so I wasn’t sure what it was.”
He rushed outside and “there was a child crying.” Hartkon said police and firefighters quickly got to the scene and got her from the truck. Weightman and his sister were standing in the driveway.
Hartkon said he first thought a van had hit his house. “I didn’t know it was an 18-wheeler until I got outside.”
William Lee is a Tribune reporter and Andrew Zuick is a morning assignment editor with WGN-TV.