The Porter County Sheriff’s Police was still trying to reconstruct this morning an accident on U.S. Highway 6 in Jackson Township which critically injured a Valparaiso man on Thursday.

Lt. Chris Eckert of the PCSP identified the victim as Nicholas Parry, 20, and said that he had been airlifted to St. James Hospital & Health Centers in Olympia Fields, Ill. As of deadline today, Parry’s condition was not known and a St. James spokesperson had not returned a call to the Chesterton Tribune.

The crash occurred at 7:36 a.m. when Parry was eastbound in the left lane of U.S. 6 and for an unknown reason lost control of his Honda Accura, rear ended a second vehicle in the right lane, then left the roadway to the south and hit a tree on the driver’s side.

The driver of the second vehicle was Janice Reineke, 53, of Jackson Township, who was not injured in the crash. Eckert said that Reineke had just pulled out of a drive in the 300 east block of U.S. 6.

Firefighters from the Liberty Township Volunteer Fire Department were called to the scene to extricate Parry from his car and were forced to remove the driver’s side door to get access to him. Meanwhile, the Chesterton Fire Department, called to the scene to assist, was tasked with preparing a landing zone for a UCAN helicopter at Jackson Elementary School at 811N 400E. When extricated, the LTVFD said, Parry was transported by Porter hospital EMS to the school and then airlifted to St. James.

The LTVFD cleared the scene at 9:12 a.m.

Eckert told the Tribune that the accident reconstruction has proved a complicated one and that investigators were trying to determine why exactly Parry lost control. He did say that the road was wet at the time of the crash.

Posted 3/14/2008