kevin.miller@roanoke.com
381-1676
The tractor-trailer collision on
Interstate 81 that killed a 25-year-old Florida woman Sunday
night is apparently only half of a double tragedy that struck
her family this weekend.
Kristina Mae Arciszewski of Mount
Dora, Fla., died Sunday night when the long-haul truck she was
driving crossed the I-81 median near mile marker 85 in Wythe
County and struck a southbound tractor-trailer head-on, police
said. A passenger in Arciszewski's truck, 33-year-old Charles
Kevin Morris of Georgia, and the driver of the second truck,
36-year-old Winford Dallas Jones Jr. of Princeton, W.Va., were
airlifted to hospitals in Roanoke and Winston-Salem, N.C., with
serious injuries.
The wreck closed the interstate's
southbound lanes for more than 12 hours, although police were
eventually able to detour traffic onto a service road.
Tragically, Arciszewski is not
the only member of her immediate family to die suddenly last
weekend.
Arciszewski's 12-year-old sister,
Shirley, died almost exactly 24 hours earlier at a group home
for troubled children in Charlotte, N.C., according to an aunt,
Loretta D'Souza of Fort Meyers, Fla.
D'Souza said the 12-year-old
apparently died after she was restrained by a worker in the
Charlotte group home where she lived. An article in Monday's
edition of The Charlotte Observer quoted a police report stating
that the girl stopped breathing after an employee at Covenant
Group Home restrained her for being unruly and violent.
It was unclear Monday why Shirley
was in foster care.
D'Souza said she did not think
Kristina Arciszewski knew about Shirley's death before the
accident on I-81. The sisters' back-to-back deaths have stunned
the family, which has been trying to regain custody of the
younger sister for some time, she said.
"Me and my other sister are
flying to Asheville [N.C.] tomorrow morning to try and make
sense out of this," D'Souza said Monday afternoon.
State police are investigating
the cause of the I-81 crash. Charlotte police are investigating
Shirley Arciszewski's death.
