Kathy Groshans killed by wrong way driver Brian O’Leary: police

Metro

By David Propper

An upstate New York grandmother was killed Monday when a pickup truck driver going the wrong way during a police chase collided head-on with the car she and her family were in, authorities said.

Kathy Groshans, 47, was pronounced dead after 37-year-old Brian O’Leary plowed his Ford F-150 truck into the 2019 Dodge Ram driven by her husband Dale Groshans, 66, on Interstate 87 in Lewis, state police said.

Their two young grandsons, 4 and 7, were airlifted to the University of Vermont Medical Center across the border in Burlington after initially being rushed to a hospital in Plattsburg for internal injuries, New York State police said.

Dale Groshans was also taken to the hospital with a head injury. They are all now in stable condition.

The ugly crash capped a police pursuit that began when callers alerted authorities to a pickup truck traveling the wrong way in Essex County around 7:39 p.m., police said.

They found O’Leary still heading north in the southbound lanes, police said. When cops tried to pull him over, he kept driving, which led to the pursuit.

O’Leary drove about 30 miles against traffic before the head-on collision with the Groshans’ truck, police said.

“Kathy Jo, you were a beautiful soul with one of the biggest, kindest hearts that ever lived. I am broken inside without you, you were the best sister I could ever had wished for,” her grieving sister Lacey Boyea LaCourse wrote on Facebook, according to the Sun Community News.

“I will miss you until my last breath. I just don’t know what else to say; I don’t know what to do without you.”

Groshans died of hemorrhage due to fractures from blunt force trauma, according to her autopsy.

A fundraising page was set up for her husband and two children, as well as funeral costs.

O’Leary, an East Millinocket, Maine, resident, was also airlifted to the University of Vermont Medical Center with life-threatening injuries that include head trauma and internal injuries. He is listed in critical condition.

He was in possession of a loaded handgun during the pursuit, which he did not have a permit to carry in New York, authorities said.

The investigation into the crash is ongoing as authorities work through a number of search warrants for the vehicles, electronic devices and biological evidence, state police said.