Thursday, July 3, 2003 | 11:25 a.m.
A truck driver who may have fallen asleep at the wheel of his tractor-trailer rig was killed this morning when he careened off Interstate 15 in Mesquite and plowed into a house before the truck burst into flames, setting the house ablaze and sending debris flying throughout the quiet neighborhood.
No one was in the house.
Two other fatal crashes in Las Vegas also occurred early today, a day before the Fourth of July holiday weekend, which is known for traffic and crashes.
"This is very unfortunate for us," Nevada Highway Patrol Trooper Angie Wolff said. "The weekend hasn't even started yet and we already have (four) fatalities."
The crash in Mesquite occurred about 4:45 a.m. The driver, hauling large rolls of paper, was heading south on I-15 at a high rate of speed. The truck failed to negotiate a curve in the freeway, Wolff said.
The truck veered across the northbound lanes, went off the highway and through a chain link fence. It flew into the air as it barreled down an embankment, crashed through another chain link fence, crossed a residential street, burst through an 8-foot cinder block wall and into an unoccupied house.
The residents, a family of seven, were on vacation in Utah, a neighbor said.
The truck burst into flames, destroying the house. Only the front wall and a side wall remain standing. More than 40 firefighters from Mesquite, Bunkerville, Logandale and Beaver Dam, Ariz., helped extinguish the fire.
The driver was pronounced dead at the scene, Clark County Fire Department spokesman Bob Leinbach said.
Two nearby houses sustained damage. The truck clipped the back of Jennifer Tichenor's house, she said. She was wearing pajamas with blood on her shirt and cuts on her face from flying debris. Her husband and three children also suffered minor cuts.
"We were all asleep and I heard some rumbling and I just thought it was an earthquake," she said. "Then debris came flying through the back of the house and we knew something had come off the freeway."
Travis Tichenor, 16, Jennifer's son, said: "I looked out my window and just saw brick flying back in my direction. The only thing I could do is make sure my little brother was OK."
A neighbor, Myra Goehring, said she was awake when the crash happened.
"I heard the rumble and thought it was an airplane crashing," she said. "I ran to the door and when I opened it, I saw a huge fireball and I could feel the heat from the flames."
Trooper Pete Hamilton said the crash was probably caused by "driver inattention."
"It's a good possibility that the driver may have fallen asleep because of the time of the morning and because the truck continued going in a straight line when the road curved."
The truck is registered in Illinois, Hamilton said.
Neighbors said a irrigation ditch used to be between the freeway and the houses, but it was taken out to build the road.
The state Transportation Department takes the proximity of homes into account when it plans freeways, spokesman Bob Mckenzie.
"When we design the road, the safety of the area and the adjacencies are a consideration," he said.
Clark County requires residences be built at least 50 feet back from freeways, although that distance can be reduced if landscape buffering or a noise-reduction wall is added, said Barbara Ginoulias, assistant director of development services for the county's department of current planning.
The house was about 50 yards from the freeway, but the tractor-trailer traveled about twice that far, as it angled from the roadway to the neighborhood.
"It certainly sounds like an unusual occurrence," Ginoulias said.
The problem is not the proximity of houses to freeways, but fatigue among drivers, said Erin Breen, director of the Safe Community Partnership at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
"All three of those fatalities were probably fatigue-related," she said. "It's a classic description of a fatigue roll-over. They drifted aside with a truck. Truckers are famous for driving on empty as far as their energy reserves will go."
The fact that in Mesquite there were few barriers between the homes and the freeway only increased the danger factor, she said.
Along the stretch of I-15 going to Utah, Mckenzie said, "It's not the road itself, it's the motorists that cause the accidents."
Shortly after that crash, about 5 a.m., troopers received a call from a Utah couple who said they saw a car on its top off I-15 south near the Apex exit.
Troopers found a dead man about 30 feet from the car, Wolff said.
Evidence at the scene showed the man was driving at a high rate of speed when his wheels locked up and he lost control of the car. It went off the highway, went airborne, flipped and landed on its roof on a dirt hill. It slid down the hill on its roof, Wolff said.
The driver might have been through from the car when it went airborne, she said.
The most heartbreaking crash was reported about 5:20 a.m. by a father who happened to be driving to work along Interstate 215 east when he noticed a crumpled car off the road near Decatur that he recognized as his 18-year-old son's, Wolff said.
"He said his son didn't come home last night and didn't pick up his grandma," she said.
The father pulled over and walked a short distance off the road to the car, described by Wolff as a green four-door.
The car was vertical, with the front end lodged between some boulders and the back end in the air. The son, Leonard Caoile, was still wearing his seat belt, but he was dead, Wolff said.
It appeared Caoile was heading east on I-215 and lost control. Wolff said it wasn't clear when the crash occurred. Because it was among boulders and covered in dirt, it wasn't easy to see from the road.
The father was distraught.
"This is hard on everyone, the first-responders, the fire department, the morgue, all of us," Wolff said.
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