By Tom Coyne
The Associated Press
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BRISTOL, Ind. — A highway pileup killed at least eight people Thursday on a rainy stretch of the Indiana Toll Road, State Police said.
The deaths included five people in a single vehicle, said 1st Sgt. Dave Bursten of the Indiana State Police. Four of the victims were Amish residents of nearby LaGrange County who riding in a car, Bristol Fire Chief William Dempster said.
The 6:45 a.m. crash in the highway’s westbound lane, about 25 miles east of South Bend, involved three semitrailers and three cars. Bursten said it might have been caused by driver inattention.
“As far as who was the inattentive driver, we’re trying to determine that now,” he said.
The crash was at the edge of a bridge reconstruction project over the St. Joseph River where westbound traffic was restricted to one lane. It was raining at the time, said State Police 1st Sgt. David Boehler, but investigators did not believe weather played a role.
The pileup left the westbound lane closed about 40 miles west of the Ohio State line.
Matt Pierce, a spokesman for toll road manager ITR Concession Co., said a colleague at the scene described the accident as happening when a semitrailer rear-ended four stopped cars at the end of a line of traffic. Those cars then hit two semitrailers in front of them, Pierce said.
While the Amish typically do not drive motor vehicles, it is common practice in the northern Indiana community for Amish workers to hire a driver to take them to work. LaGrange County has one of the largest Amish populations in the country.
The accident scene about one mile east of Bristol is near a crash site that killed five people last year on the east-west tollway, which also is Interstates 80 and 90.