Throughout Chicago, Illinois, mothers and fathers experience great joy when learning that a baby has been successfully conceived. However, sometimes accidents happen, resulting in serious injuries and the wrongful death of the baby and the mother. That happened recently when a pregnant woman was driving to her home after her workday ended. As she was driving on I-80, tragedy struck.
A semitractor-trailer’s wheel hub detached from the rear tractor axle and slammed into the windshield of woman’s car, a 2016 GMC Acadia, around 2:20 p.m. on a recent Tuesday afternoon near Joliet. Weighing 100 pounds, the wheel hub had enormous destructive impact, and emergency responders rushed the pregnant woman to the hospital. However, it was too late, and the woman was pronounced dead at the hospital. The baby son she carried, who was expected to have to have been born just 10 days later, was also killed in the accident.
The woman had three other children, all daughters, whose ages were 15 months, 5 and 8. The unborn baby was her only son. Her husband and father of their children, along with their daughters, have lost someone they cared about very much.
The husband’s father has speculated about how if the woman had passed by the place where the accident happened 5 minutes before or 5 minutes after, it wouldn’t have happened. These are things that are struggled with by survivors of victims of deadly accidents.
A witness said that the woman was probably not aware of what was headed towards her until a moment before impact. Charges have been filed against the driver of the truck that the wheel hub came off of. That driver, 59, is accused of having had unsafe equipment on the semitractor-trailer. That illustrates how dangerous it is for anyone to go out on the roads with equipment that is anything other than completely safe, which is why everyone with a vehicle should have it comprehensively checked before going out on the roads.
Source: Miami Herald, “‘Could happen to anyone at any time’: Flying wheel hub kills pregnant mom of 3, Illinois cops say,” Josh Magness, March 08, 2018