Four people died in a head-on collision on Route 4 in Berwick early Saturday afternoon, the deadliest crash in Maine in more than three years.
Three people died at the scene and another died at an area hospital. Four more people were hospitalized, one with critical injuries.
The Berwick Police Department said in a statement that the crash happened at 1:30 p.m. about a mile from the Links at Outlook golf course in this small York County town near the New Hampshire border.
A Berwick police dispatcher said late Saturday that officers had cleared the scene shortly before 8:30 p.m. The dispatcher said no other information would be released until Sunday, after officers notified family members of the deceased.
Justin Baggs, a South Berwick firefighter who responded to the accident, posted on Facebook that it was “definitely one of the most horrible accidents I’ve been to in a while. Hug your loved ones a little tighter, little longer.”
Route 4 in Berwick was closed for several hours Saturday while the accident was reconstructed and investigated. The Maine Warden Service assisted local police. Traffic was diverted to Agamenticus Road and Knights Pond Road.
That stretch of Route 4, like many rural two-lane roads throughout Maine, is prone to serious accidents.
In 2013, a local special education teacher was killed in the same area when an SUV driven by a 17-year-old boy crossed the centerline and struck her car. Amy Harris died instantly, police said. Her two children, then 7 and 4, were injured but survived. The teenager who caused the accident was not charged criminally, but Harris’ family later filed a wrongful death lawsuit.
Saturday’s accident in Berwick added to an already deadly couple of days on Maine roads.
A 15-year-old girl was killed in an accident in Edgecomb on Friday afternoon that also injured three passengers. A man died in a rollover in Brownfield, also Friday. And a motorcyclist was killed in a crash Saturday afternoon in Auburn.
Maine State Police spokesman Stephen McCausland said the last time at least four people were killed in a motor vehicle accident was in March 2015 in the Aroostook County town of Stockholm. A car and an SUV collided on a snow-covered stretch of Route 161 north of Caribou, killing four and seriously injuring another person.
Icy roads also were a factor in a two-vehicle accident that killed six young adults in Poland during Christmas weekend 2006.
On Mother’s Day in 2004, three women and four children were killed in a crash on Interstate 95 in Carmel, about 10 miles south of Bangor. The SUV they were traveling in went out of control and crashed into a cluster of trees in the median. An investigation found that the vehicle was traveling 103 mph.
Maine’s deadliest motor vehicle accident occurred in 2002, when a van carrying 15 immigrant workers on a logging road near the Allagash Wilderness Waterway in Aroostook County plunged off a bridge. All but one died.
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