Five dead, including two children, in fiery head-on wreck near Georgia’s Lake Sinclair
Five people were killed, including two children, in a head-on crash just north of Lake Sinclair early Tuesday, sheriff’s officials in Putnam County said.
The wreck happened at about 12:45 a.m. along the four-lane U.S. Highway 441 between Milledgeville and Eatonton.
Four of the victims, who suffered severe burns, were riding in a 2018 Honda Civic that authorities said appeared to have been traveling the wrong way — south in the highway’s northbound lanes — for more than a mile.
The fatal collision happened about a mile and half north of Lake Sinclair.
The driver of a northbound 2005 Nissan Xterra, Mayla Dostie, 44, of Eatonton, had just gotten off work at a Qarbon Aerospace in Milledgeville and was headed home to Putnam, Sheriff Howard Sills said. Dostie died at the scene.
Dostie’s SUV was met head-on by the southbound Civic, driven by Hailey Brook Hayes, 22, of Eatonton.
The Civic caught fire on impact.
Hayes was killed along with her two children, 8-month-old Tucker Hudspeth and 3-year-old Bentley Barlow. Another passenger in the Honda, Zaleigh Adaya Brooks, 23, of Eatonton, also died.
The cause of the crash was being investigated, but at midday Tuesday the sheriff said answers may be hard to come by. Other than to attribute the cause to a wrong-way driver, and all involved died.
“There’s no way to know what precipitated that,” Sills said. “You wonder what could have caused it.”
Sills added: “We have these terrible accidents. It almost always involves somebody on the wrong side of the road or crossing the (road’s) centerline.”
This developing story will be updated.
This story was originally published August 1, 2023 at 10:02 AM with the headline "Five dead, including two children, in fiery head-on wreck near Georgia’s Lake Sinclair."