Families mourn death of church friends in Metra collision
By Susan DeMar Lafferty and STEVE METSCH Sun-Times Media July 22, 2011 9:04PM
Gayle Larsen looks at a photo of her grandmother, Gail Crabtree, at their home on New England Avenue in Tinley Park, IL on Friday July 22, 2011. Gail Crabtree was one of the women killed in the Metra train accident in Oak Forest, Il on Thursday | Matt Marton~Sun-Times Media
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Updated: July 23, 2011 2:06AM
Donna Grace and Gail Crabtree were close friends and church buddies who loved being together.
The two Tinley Park seniors died together Thursday afternoon as they returned home from doing what they loved to do every Thursday — playing dominoes at a recreation center in south suburban Crestwood.
They dropped off another friend, Jeanette Slager, 84, and headed south on Central Avenue,where they collided with a Chicago-bound Metra train about 4 p.m. in Oak Forest.
Grace, 81, and Crabtree, 97, were killed instantly, officials said.
“Fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes,” Jeanette Slager said Friday, referring to the time that elapsed between her getting out of Grace’s car and the collision.
“I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t. The Lord took them home. The Lord didn’t want me yet,” the Oak Forest resident said.
The cause and manner of Grace’s and Crabtree’s deaths are “pending further investigation,” a Cook County medical examiner’s office spokesman said late Friday.
Metra spokeswoman Judy Pardonnet said the gates and all equipment were working and all personnel were acting appropriately when the car hit the front of the train.
Stunned family members are struggling to understand how the accident could have happened.
“Even though it was the hottest day of the year, they wanted to be together and play dominoes,” Grace’s daughter Kathy Hoster, of Mokena, said. “She was doing what she loved.”
“She was an excellent driver, always cautious, always alert,” Hoster said. “We’re still shocked.”
Grace shared a house with her son Stephen. He was sitting in her favorite chair Friday afternoon, describing her as a “tomboy farm girl” who grew up in rural Minnesota. She enjoyed reading and loved dogs and often fed carrots to the neighbor’s pit bulls, he said.
On Friday, police reviewed a note Grace wrote to her son, that they found in her house Thursday.
A Cook County sheriff’s police spokesman confirmed it was not a suicide note.
“She was probably telling me to straighten out,” her son said.
Both women were active seniors, mentally sharp, in good health and faithful members of Heritage Baptist Church in Frankfort, family members said. Crabtree had just celebrated her 97th birthday last week.
“She told me on her birthday that she was going to live as long as her mother, who was 102,” Crabtree’s granddaughter Gayle Louise Larsen said. “If that big train didn’t get in the way ...”
Larsen, who shared a home with her grandmother, said she is comforted in the belief that “it was done in a second, that they did not suffer.”
“But we have no clue as to what, how or why,” she said.
Crabtree gave up driving last year, but still liked to do everything for herself, Larsen said.
“No one had better not ever tell her she couldn’t do it. She was a tough old lady,” she said. “Nothing less than a train could have stopped her.”
Slager had also given up driving.
“Donna would take me to the store, to the doctor,” Slager said, choking back tears.
Slager watched televised reports of the crash Thursday but never suspected her friends were in the car. She got a phone call from Crabtree’s granddaughter, wondering if she knew her whereabouts.
“I said they dropped me off. I told them to go home. They said they’d go straight home. They went home to the Lord,” Slager said.
“Donna was a very careful driver” who would never try to beat a train at a crossing, Slager said.
“We don’t know what happened. She was having no trouble with the car, not when I was in it. It was working fine,” Slager said.
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