New Details Emerge In Fatal Assateague Crash
Shawn J. Soper, Staff Writer
OCEAN CITY (02/18/2005) - While investigators may never know exactly what happened on the beach at Assateague Island, nearly two weeks when an off-road vehicle overturned and ultimately claimed the lives of its two occupants, new details emerged this week providing a little more insight into the moments after the crash.
On Saturday, Feb. 5, around 9:30 p.m., the OnStar vehicle-equipped emergency services system received a call from a vehicle in distress on Assateague Island. Using the provided latitude and longitude coordinates provided by OnStar, National Parks Service rangers initiated a search of the island, particularly focusing on the area designated for off-road vehicle traffic, but the search proved fruitless.
Early the next day, surfers discovered an overturned Hummer and the body of its driver, Adam Starky, 25, of Cockeysville, near it on the beach in the surf in an area where off-road vehicles are not allowed. A little more than 24 hours later, a state park ranger found the body of Starky’s passenger, Jennifer Holly Ashe, 24, also of Cockeysville, about a half-mile south of the Ocean City Inlet and roughly five miles north of the Hummer accident scene.
The State Medical Examiners Office this week officially determined the cause of Starky’s death to be leg injuries complicated by hypothermia. The official autopsy results for Ashe are still pending as of yesterday.
Because of the terrain and the lack of roads on the island, OnStar used its high tech global positioning system (GPS) to approximate the location of the distressed vehicle and relayed the information to the appropriate emergency response agencies.
“Our folks took the call and because there are no roads there, we provided longitude and latitude coordinates to emergency responders,” said OnStar Vice President of Communications Terry Sullivan.
While the series of events leading up to the accident may never be known, new details emerged this week about the initial call to OnStar.
The OnStar call center, which provides personalized emergency roadside assistance to equipped vehicles 24 hours a day and 365 days a year, receives calls from vehicles in distress in several different ways. For example, a deployed airbag or sensors on the vehicle detecting a moderate or severe collision can automatically transmit an emergency service call to OnStar.
However, in the case of the Hummer accident on Assateague, the call came from a distressed individual and not from a deployed airbag or other source, according to Sullivan.
“We received an emergency button press from an individual in or near the vehicle,” he said. “An air bag deployment did not trigger this one. The call was clearly made from a woman in distress.”
It now appears Ashe had the wherewithal to push the button to initiate the call to OnStar, but the emergency services facilitator was not able to make a verbal connection with the victim.
“We did receive the emergency key press but were never able to make verbal contact with the caller,” he said. “We could hear a woman in distress on the tape but it was unintelligible. We could hear screams but it was garbled.”
Sullivan said it was possible the caller was no longer in the vehicle when OnStar attempted to respond to her call for help.
“It almost sounded like the caller was outside the vehicle,” he said. “If that was the case, we would have been able to hear her, but she wouldn’t have necessarily been able to hear us.”
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