PYSHT — Punctuating one of many hairpin curves that wind along state Highway 112, an eerily natural landmark sits carved out along the road’s shoulder where it leans against shallow Pysht River waters.
On a clear and breezy spring day, four teens stood silently at the spot Sunday, processing the enormity of what happened there the day before.
A wooden tree stump. A half-moon shaped patch of grass towering over a 10-foot embankment.
And unmistakable tire marks burned into the pavement, a painful blueprint of the path one young man’s car took early Saturday morning when it overshot the curve and tumbled into the muddy river, trapping him and three others inside.
They weren’t found until daylight. It was too late by then.
The crash took the lives of driver John Hubble, 20, and his passengers Erik Kroeger and Damien Anderson, both 18, and Cassidy Hunter, 16. All were from Clallam Bay.
“I wonder how it happened,” said a weary and numb Megan Stewart, a senior at Clallam Bay High School who, like most of her classmates, knew the victims exceptionally well.
Stewart and three friends ventured to the spot to add to a growing memorial, laying yellow daffodils on the stump that crash scene investigators say probably caused Hubble’s Geo Metro to propel over the banks of the Pysht and turn on its top.
By Sunday afternoon, someone had planted four white crosses, each painted with the name of one of the victims.
