Matt Zinchuk was worried. In three decades, his mom rarely missed a piano lesson. And yet, on that Monday evening in May, with students waiting at the family’s Champaign home, Amy Zinchuk and her husband Michael were nowhere to be found.
He called his sister, Elizabeth, in suburban St. Louis. “Hey, did mom and dad leave yet?”
Elizabeth started to panic. After their weekend visit, her parents said they were leaving their hotel early that morning.
The drive home typically takes three hours. They should have been back already.Elizabeth grabbed her phone. Her thumbs raced across the screen. She called her parents first. Neither answered. She tried family members. Police. Hospital emergency rooms.
Earlier in the day, her husband shared an article about a big crash on Interstate 55. But she told herself not to worry, that accidents happen on interstates all the time. And when her parents didn’t respond to her text messages asking if they made it home safely, she told herself they were busy people and not always very good at replying to texts anyway.
Eventually, her grandmother’s husband phoned. He’d spoken to authorities. Her parents’ car was found among the wreckage of the interstate crash. They didn’t survive.
Elizabeth screamed. She whipped her phone across the room.
“I felt everything at once,” Elizabeth, 29, remembered.
In all, 84 cars and trucks were caught in the May 1 pileup along I-55 in central Illinois, about 20 miles south of Springfield. Investigators believe the series of crashes started when high winds picked up soil from recently planted farm fields, creating a blinding dust storm that instantly engulfed the busy interstate.
Eight people died from injuries suffered in the crash. In the weeks that followed, the Tribune spoke with family members of all but one of the eight fatal victims (relatives of Otto Medina-Salazar, 58, of Carthage, Missouri, could not be located).
These are their stories:
Shirley Harper, 88
For days after the crash, Rachael Unverferth could barely bring herself to look at the news, knowing she would likely see her grandmother mentioned only as: Shirley Harper, 88, of Franklin, Wisconsin.
There was so much more to say about a woman who overcame a tumultuous childhood and early tragedy to become the matriarch of her large family, the co-founder of a beloved southern Illinois campground and a 15-year caseworker for the state.
“That’s one of the hardest things,” said Rachael, 38, “to see someone who was so big in your life reduced to this simple line.”
Shirley was born in Chicago in 1935. With the country still in the grips of the Great Depression, she bounced between homes, living for stretches with her mom, then dad, then aunts and uncles in the Chicago area and Wisconsin.
She spent the longest stretch of childhood in Fox Lake and attended Grant Community High School, where she met Robert Wicinski, two years her senior, then a private in the U.S. Army. They married shortly after she graduated and moved to an Army base in Alabama.
After the Army, the couple relocated to Waukegan. Their first child, Steven, was born in 1956 and died of pneumonia seven months later. The next year, they welcomed a son, Greg. Five more children would follow.
Eventually, Shirley and Robert would divorce, though they remained friends and saw each other regularly until his death in 2007.
By the early 1970s, Shirley was working as a server and host at a Holiday Inn in Round Lake Beach. There, she met Lee Harper, a sanitation company owner. They married in 1973 and moved to a 120-acre farm his parents owned in Fairfield.
The couple turned the southern Illinois farm, with its 13-acre lake, into a campground. In a book she started writing for her family, called, “So you want to own a campground?” Shirley described the first winter in Fairfield and the conversation with her husband that led to the creation of Harper Valley Campground:
While we were buried inside for the rest of the winter, I asked how it was that we were going to support ourselves in this new land.
Not to worry. There are ways to make a living.
Well, says I, why don’t we open a campground?
CAMPGROUND!???? Way out here in the country?
Of course. You would not open one in the city … besides we have a lake for swimming and fishing. It’s perfect!
Hmmmmmm.
Look, let me show you …
The campground opened to the public in 1974. Most of their children and grandchildren spent time there, occasionally as staff. It closed in 1985 but remained a spot for family vacations until the couple sold it in the 1990s, after Lee’s health started to deteriorate.
The year after the campground closed, Shirley took a job as a caseworker with the Illinois Department of Human Services. There, she helped connect families to medical and food benefits, undoubtedly drawing on her own childhood struggles.
“She just liked people, liked talking to people and knowing their stories,” her granddaughter said.
Shirley retired from the state in 2001, the year after her husband’s death. She moved north, living on her own or with family near Milwaukee. She relished being with her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, especially on Thanksgiving, when she could be counted on to make an overly sweet, sweet potato casserole.
“Her early life and the instability it created, all she wanted was a family to belong to,” Rachael said. “She just welcomed everybody with open arms. If you were dating someone, she was all in. She loved everybody completely, faults and all. You really couldn’t do wrong in her eyes.”
A week before her death, Shirley was in St. Louis. She planned to move there in October to be closer to her daughter, Rhonda, and Rachael’s family. She spent part of the trip picking out kitchen cabinets and bathroom fixtures for the apartment being built for her in Rhonda’s basement.
“She was so excited about this island and coffee with mom every day and stools for kids to park up and she could talk about what was going on with their world,” Rachael said.
Rachael’s aunt came down for the weekend to pick up Shirley and take her back to suburban Milwaukee. The family had dinner together Sunday night.
“I’ll see you in October,” Rachael told Shirley as they hugged goodbye.
The next day, Rachael’s aunt and grandmother left. Sometime that afternoon, Rachael’s mom called. There had been a dust storm on the interstate and an accident. Her aunt was uninjured, she said, but Shirley didn’t make it.
The minutes and hours that came next seemed to paradoxically speed up and slow down at the same time.
“It’s dreamlike,” Rachael remembered. “You question reality because everything has those fuzzy edges.”
In the account Rachael’s aunt gave, they were driving along the interstate when they hit a wall of dust. Her aunt tried to pull over when she hit something that sent the car spinning. Other collisions followed, too many for her aunt to count. The force of those impacts was too much for Shirley.
Since the crash, Rachael has read up on farming practices in Illinois and the discussion around soil conservation efforts that some say could have prevented the dust storm that ultimately led to her grandmother’s death.
She’s not interested in finding fault, only solutions going forward, so no families have to get the phone call she received that day.
And in the meantime, she’ll keep her grandmother’s story alive, so people know Shirley Harper was more than a six-word sentence .
“She was just a pretty magnificent person,” Rachael said. “God, we’re going to miss her.”
Ruth Rau, 81
When people found out that Otto and Ruth Rau were married for 63 years, they’d sometimes ask if there was a secret to such a long marriage.
“It’s real simple,” Otto answered. “I learned at a young age to just say, ‘yes, ma’am,’ and everything goes off well. That’s it.”
It also helped, family said, that Ruth was unfailingly kind and welcoming to everyone she met.
Born in 1941, Ruth grew up in Sorento, Illinois, 50 miles northeast of St. Louis. She and Otto knew each other as kids. Once, when she was 12 and Otto was 18, he jokingly told her dad that he was going to marry her one day.
“I can’t tell you what he said to me,” remembered Otto, 87.
Despite her dad’s threats, Otto and Ruth started dating when she turned 18. Less than a year later, they married at Otto’s parents’ home.
“We didn’t have much money,” Otto said. “I gave the preacher $20 in an envelope and he turned around and gave it back to me.”
With Otto on the road hauling Chryslers from the company’s Fenton, Missouri, plant, Ruth stayed home to raise their two sons, Darrell and Rex.
“She was the best, always was there for us,” said Rex, 61.
Ruth was an avid reader — partial to mysteries — and crocheted just about anything that could be crocheted. As her sons grew older and started having their own children, she worked part time taking catalog orders for Sears and, later, at a bank in nearby Hillsboro.
Well after retirement, she remembered the names of people and customers she encountered.
“She never forgot anybody,” Otto said. “She’d go to the grocery store for two items and an hour later come out.”
That Monday, May 1, Otto and Ruth were heading to Springfield to see Ruth’s heart doctor about a clogged artery and the need for a new valve.
In 32 years as a truck driver, through every type of storm, Otto said he never saw a wall of dust like the one that suddenly blanketed the interstate that morning. He could barely see and couldn’t stop in time to avoid crashing into a car in front of him.
The force of the collision sent their car skidding over to the median. They heard the pops of other cars slamming into each other.
A police officer eventually appeared in the dust and asked if they were hurt. Otto’s ribs were sore. Ruth said her neck hurt. The officer asked if they could hang on for a few minutes. Ambulances were coming, but there were other people who looked to be in bad shape.
Ruth told the officer to tend to those people first.
Maybe 20 minutes passed and the pain in Ruth’s neck was growing more severe. Otto found the same police officer, who escorted the couple to a waiting ambulance. Ruth was then ushered to a helicopter and airlifted to HSHS St. John’s Hospital in Springfield; Otto was taken there by ambulance. He was treated for a cracked rib and released the next day.
Ruth suffered a broken vertebrae in her neck. At first, it seemed she would pull through, but she caught pneumonia, and the combined strain on her body was too great.
On May 16, Ruth died in the hospital.
“After 63 years, you do pretty good until right now, when you start talking about it,” Otto said. “And you realize how much you miss her.”
Earl LeGrand, 64
The call came to Amy LeGrand and her family while they were in Bruges, Belgium. Dad was missing.
She and her brother, Corbin LeGrand, had visited Europe on another vacation with their father, Earl LeGrand, four years earlier. On that trip, they drank together at Oktoberfest and bathed in Budapest’s thermal baths. Earl even posed for a photo with his trucking company’s newsletter on Prague’s Charles Bridge.
But on this trip, the siblings learned their father couldn’t be found. When a state trooper called to say Earl’s truck had caught fire in the crash, the siblings and their mother didn’t wait for official confirmation. They flew back. In America, they learned more: Earl had been killed while driving his semi.
Lifelong friends filled the 64-year-old’s memorial service in Florissant, Missouri, where he lived in the home his parents raised him in and where some neighbors had known him as a boy. He had become the man they could count on to come pick them up when stranded or pop over to fix their brakes.
At the service, they told Amy her father had been incredibly proud of her and Corbin, she said. He had been an attentive and present father, supportive of whatever paths his beloved children took, she said.
A more typical parent might’ve not supported her choice to be a musician. But Earl showed up just about every time Amy, a fiddle player, performed. He heard her bow the same twangs of bluegrass his own father taught her, she said.
“He was just a really good dad,” Amy said.
Earl sometimes opted to fish and loved to hunt. He spent time with friends and the family that still lived nearby. He could talk with anyone, Amy said.
“He never knew a stranger,” she said.
He ingrained his ceaseless work ethic in his kids, she added. He worked for only a handful of companies in his near 40-year career as a truck driver. Still, he came home every night, preferring the day drives over long haul trips, Amy remembered.
Corbin recalled his father as reliable and outgoing. He answered when called, Earl’s son said.
Earl wore a Bluetooth headset when he drove. He would chitchat with other truckers, Corbin said.
“He enjoyed being able to just drive,” he said.
Corbin saw his dad a few times when Earl drove his semi to Kansas City, where Corbin lives. The fatal crash had been sobering for Earl’s fellow drivers, the son added.
The work hadn’t seemed dangerous. He was a skilled, experienced professional, Amy said.
“Quite honestly, I wouldn’t have thought that this would ever happen at work,” she said.
Joseph Bates, 73, and Donna Bates, 71
A daughter of Joseph Bates, 73, and Donna Bates, 71, both of Crystal Lake, declined an interview request on behalf of the family.
Donna, a Carl Schurz High School graduate, assisted teachers at a Crystal Lake elementary school for over 20 years, according to her obituary. Her singing career began when she was 18 and took her onto three cruises, “The Phil Donahue Show” and a Toni Tennille special, the obituary said.
Joseph, a Princeton, Indiana native, served in the Marine Corps, rising to the rank of corporal before beginning his career in insurance. He spent free time working on projects in his garage as Donna gardened, their obituary said.
But time spent with their two daughters and the rest of their family was the greatest joy for the couple married for 37 years, according to the obituary.
Together, the couple were “beloved parents who dedicated their lives to their family and community,” a GoFundMe set up to cover the Bates funeral expenses said. “They were always willing to lend a helping hand to those in need and were loved by all who knew them.”
Michael Zinchuk, 55, and Amy Zinchuk, 54
They appeared, at first glance, to be an unlikely pair. He was a Chicagoan, the oldest of seven. She and her two siblings and parents accounted for five of the roughly 800 people who, at the time, called Gifford, Illinois, home.
But Michael and Amy Zinchuk quickly fell in love as students at the University of Illinois, and in 30 years of marriage, the people who knew them — of which there were many — easily saw how well they complemented each other.
He supported her, always, never complaining when their house was overrun with children coming by for piano lessons.
She brought out his playfulness, a side that could be overlooked given his intimidating 6-foot-4 frame and his fierce protectiveness of his family and his principles.
When he wasn’t working two jobs, sales for Xerox and logistics for FedEx, Michael liked to garden, play guitar or read. He devoured books about history, but also read to his three kids the entire Harry Potter series, his voice hoarse from their length. He took pride in always learning something new — Scrabble games at the Zinchuk house usually involved Michael playing large or obscure words.
“And if you challenged it,” his daughter, Elizabeth, said, “he would get a big smile on his face and you’d find it in the dictionary.”
Simply put, Amy was the linchpin of the family. She worked as an administrator and bookkeeper for a restaurant group in the Champaign area. But her passion was music. She started teaching piano from home in the ’90s and by word-of-mouth alone grew to 60 students.
She was known to spontaneously dance in the grocery store aisle when a song she liked came over the speakers. She regularly took her kids to concerts: Prince, Violent Femmes, Earth, Wind & Fire. She and Elizabeth had tickets to see Shania Twain in St. Louis earlier this month.
“She was my best friend, for sure.”
The weekend before their death, Amy and Michael drove to suburban St. Louis to see Elizabeth and her husband. They went on a taco bar crawl — a stranger complimented Michael on his Conan the Barbarian T-shirt, which, Elizabeth said, “made his day.” At a popular barbecue restaurant, Amy started dancing when she heard back-to-back Led Zeppelin songs — “I just love this place,” she remarked.
They stopped at a winery, took a walk through scenic Forest Park and played cards. And before heading to their hotel Sunday night, they hugged each other tightly and said their goodbyes.
“People keep saying, ‘I can’t imagine.’ I can’t either,” Elizabeth said. “I can’t imagine the rest of my life without my parents. Whenever my brothers and I envision our future, our parents were in it. It’s been an impossible experience to really wrap your head around.”
In the days after the crash, family and friends rallied around Elizabeth and her brothers. A GoFundMe, set up by the parent of one of Amy’s former piano students, quickly surpassed its fundraising goal.
The support has been comforting, and overwhelming.
“That’s a huge testament to my parents,” Elizabeth said. “Both of them were just amazing people. They had so much life left to live.”