Idaho family, friends create GoFundMePage for lost daughter

Sunday night, tragedy struck south of La Pine when a head-on collision killed Alan James Eutsler of Bend and seriously injured Donald Adams and his wife, Barbara, from Rathdrum, Idaho. Their 10-year-old daughter also died and 8-year-old son was injured.

“You know, we feel what happens on the highway. We’re people and so there’s just no words that really help tell the story,” said ODOT spokesman Peter Murphy said Wednesday.

Just in the past several months, there have been four confirmed fatal crashes along Central Oregon’s major highways.

After only four months of implementation, the higher speed limit for stretches of Highway 97 has now been reduced.

“When you look into a situation and you find driver behavior is one of the leading causes, I struggle with what can I do to help change the behavior,” Murphy said. “And one of the things I can do is help talk about what happened and what we do on the highway and urge people that they’re the folks that make the final call on what happens on the highway.”

Friends and family members of the family have now set up a GoFundMe page, to support the family through their difficult time. Classmates of the girl, Amber Adams, are mourning her loss, KREM reports.

More than anything, awareness of safe driving on the road can help prevent fatal crashes like this from happening in the future, officials said.

“It appears the motorist who caused the crash was passing where he shouldn’t have been passing,” Murphy said. “And the consequence of that is that a 10-year-old girl lost her life.

“Be conscious of what you’re doing on the highway, that you’re being as safe as you can be, that you’re not distracted, that you’re being as safe as you can be and driving no more than the speed limit, and in some cases less.”