If you’ve been paying even the slightest attention, you might have noticed a seemingly high number of horrible crashes in Kane County in the past couple of weeks.
On Aug. 21, officials said an investigation indicates a Maple Park man was killed when the motorcycle he was driving westbound on Keslinger Road was hit by a car driven by a 16-year-old girl from Sugar Grove as she was exiting the parking lot of Kaneland High School at the end of the school day.
The following week, a head-on crash on Route 47 at Kenmar Drive sent one driver to Northwestern Medicine Delnor Hospital in Geneva in serious condition while the second driver was airlifted to Good Samaritan Hospital in Downers Grove in critical condition. Four days later, three people were killed around 9:30 p.m. on Route 30 near Davis Road in Big Rock. A preliminary investigation indicates the driver of a Honda Civic passed a vehicle in front of him in a no-passing zone and struck a Harley Davidson head-on, officials said.That crash on Sept. 2 was particularly devastating, Kane County Sheriff Ron Hain told me, as the motorcycle flew into the Civic’s front window, instantly killing the Waterman driver of the car. The body of the motorcycle passenger from Elburn was found a half-hour later at the scene, while the Harley driver, also from Elburn, was pronounced dead a short time later at Ascension Mercy in Aurora. The following day, yet another fatal crash occurred at the intersection of Walker Road and Route 72 in Hampshire, where it took first responders an hour to extract the deceased driver of one vehicle and the critically injured passenger of a second vehicle, officials said. That most recent crash, which occurred around 5:30 p.m. on Sunday, prompted Hain to release a statement about the “atypical” number of fatal crashes in his jurisdiction over the last several weeks. While these crashes have all been in different locations and were caused by different reasons, they were “mostly due to the lack of awareness or attention to the surroundings of the drivers,” he said. And even if there had been deputies “on every corner of the county, most of these crashes would’ve still occurred.” It’s an obvious statement, but one Hain felt needed to be publicly stated in response to criticisms directed at the sheriff’s department by those who like to find fault with law enforcement whenever they can.“People need to stop blaming the sheriff’s office for failing to have a presence” when these crashes are often caused by “sheer negligence or ignorance of traffic laws,” Hain said on Tuesday. Referring to the fatal accident outside Kaneland, he said that for more than four years his department has been delivering “a constant message” about the dangers of the roads near the school, and has also provided overtime details that help direct traffic during those peak morning and afternoon hours.It doesn’t help, he said, that civil engineering has not kept up with the amount of traffic on Kane County’s roads. It’s a county problem, he noted, that will only get worse if warehouses are brought in at the Interstate 88/Route 47 interchange, which is being proposed by Crown Community Development as Sugar Grove officials are looking at possibly annexing the site of the proposed 760-acre development. In his press release, Hain mentioned that since the pandemic, he believes there’s been “an increased lack of responsibility of drivers for the safety of one another,” which he later told me included drivers eluding police after committing crimes such as property theft. Cops are easy targets now, he said, which is why the sheriff is not only concerned about the number of serious accidents on local roads but also because he believes people are not taking responsibility for their own actions. Hain, who insists he’s spoken frequently on the “increased lack of responsibility of drivers,” is also “frustrated,” he admits.“We continue our traffic enforcement campaigns across all 550 square miles of this county,” he said when ending the press release.
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