NHP says driver in crash fell asleep

Keith Paul

Thursday, March 9, 2000 | 11:26 a.m.

A van full of 13 people "launched like a rocket" off Interstate 15 and into a steep ditch median, killing eight and injuring five, after the driver apparently fell asleep, Nevada Highway Patrol officials said this morning.

Passengers were thrown from the green Dodge van Wednesday as it tumbled down the hard dirt from the northbound lane of I-15 in Jean, about 25 miles south of Las Vegas. Officials are calling the 1 p.m. crash the worst single-vehicle accident in Southern Nevada history.

White sheets covered the bodies that were scattered around the interstate median. One body was about 50 feet from where the van came to rest.

A two-thirds full bottle of vodka was found among the scattered luggage and other belongings in the median between the two Jean hotel-casinos. Blood was drawn from the injured driver, Yury Shkolnikoy, 63, but toxicology test results to determine if alcohol was a factor will not be back for several days, said Trooper Michael Cooke, highway patrol spokesman.

The five survivors were flown to University Medical Center in Las Vegas. Shkolnikoy, two male passengers, Mikhail Elkin, 60, and Marat Romanovskiy, 60, and two female passengers, Ana Kupikov, 63, and Svetlana Shkolnikov, 58, were all listed in fair condition this morning.

The eight dead -- three men and five women -- were ages 41 to 67. Their names were not released this morning as Clark County Coroner officials were still trying to notify their families.

Troopers are still investigating the accident, but Cooke said speed and weather did not appear to contribute to the crash. Although it was raining as troopers investigated the accident, they said the road was dry when the accident occurred.

The dust was still settling from the rolling van when a Clark County paramedic from nearby Fire Station 87 pulled into the median.

Robin Brown checked one person, but it was too late. He move on to another person, and once again the person was dead.

"This is life sometimes. You help the ones you can," said Brown, who was the EMS supervisor for the nearby Clark County Fire Department emergency station. "There were people I could help here and I didn't think about the ones I couldn't help."

Truck driver Paul Green was behind the van when the accident happened and said the van hit the guardrail and "got launched like a rocket."

Green, who volunteers for a search and rescue team in his Utah hometown, stopped his truck and ran down into the median to help, but he also encountered more people who died than people who needed his help.

"The first person I went to I checked for a pulse, but they were deceased. The next person also was deceased," he said. "There were several people who survived and I did what I could."

Several other people also stopped after the accident to assist. Brown and other paramedics cut the roof off the van to get to the few people who didn't get thrown out when the van started rolling across the median. Troopers said most of the people in the van were not wearing seatbelts.

Green said he knew people were going to need his help when he saw the van tumbling down the median.

"I had to stop. There is no way I could have just kept driving and not stopped to help those people," he said. "I couldn't do that. I had to try and help those people."

The 15-passenger Dodge Ram Wagon 3500 van was rented from a Thrifty Car Rental in Glendale, Calif., near Los Angeles, Tuesday night by a man with a Russian name, said Chris Payne, a spokesman for the Tulsa, Okla.-based company.

"The manager said he thought the person who rented the van had a driver's license from Maryland," Payne said.

The rental car company had no other information about the man who rented the van or where he was headed. The highway patrol is still trying to determine the relationship between the people in the van and their destination, Cooke said.

The Clark County Fire Department put a station behind the Gold Strike hotel-casino a couple of years ago because of the number of serious accidents that occur in the area, Bob Leinbach, department spokesman, said.

There were multiple accidents on the nearby stretch of I-15 last year including several fatal accidents.

On June 27, 1999, seven California residents died in a fiery two-vehicle accident on I-15 near Primm about seven miles from the location of Wednesday's accident. In the June accident, a car went across the median, went into the other lanes and hit a minivan. The two vehicles burst into flames. Two people in the car and five in the minivan died.

Keith Paul covers crime and public safety for the Sun. He can be reached at (702) 259-4057 or by e-mail at keith@lasvegassun.com.