A New York father made the horrifying discovery that his two teenage daughters had been killed in a car accident after he tracked their phones to the wreckage after they stopped replying to his text messages.
Haley Trumbull, 19, and Shelby Trumbull, 17, were killed in the crash in Ira, New York, about 25 miles from Syracuse. They had been on their way home from Seabreeze amusement park in Rochester on Thursday night, said their grieving father, Brian Trumbull. people.
The girls were driving to their home in Fulton around 6 p.m. when their Chevrolet Cobalt “went over a hill,” veered into the oncoming lane and struck a Jeep Cherokee. Cayuga County Sheriff’s Office This was confirmed in a press release.
Haley and Shelby Trumbull died at the scene of the crash, while the Jeep driver, Robin Latham, 59, was rushed to Syracuse University Hospital with serious injuries but was listed in stable condition, authorities said.
Brian Trumbull, 45, told the outlet he was worried his daughters hadn’t come home and had texted them several times but hadn’t heard back.
He figured his daughters would be back soon, as they were driving through poor cell phone reception.
However, at around the same time as the accident, he used the Find My Friends app to track the girls and discovered they were on Ferris Road in Cato, about three miles from where he was.
The grieving father said he had informed her of his daughter’s situation when his girlfriend broke the horrific news.
“She said, ‘Oh my God, I heard something happened on Ferris Street,'” he told the outlet.
He immediately rushed to the scene but was stopped by police officers who had blocked the road.
The father, who waited anxiously near the scene of the accident to find out what had happened to his daughters, was informed further down the road that two of them had been involved in an accident, one of them having died.
“He sat on the bumper of the car and couldn’t get up,” his shocked father recalled.
He later learned that his daughter, Shelby Trumbull, died instantly in the tragic accident, but his daughter, Haley, was still alive when emergency responders arrived.
Brian Trumbull said firefighter Josh Lovejoy was comforting his daughter Hailey during her final moments.
The accident is still under investigation.
“It’s too early to say exactly what happened, what caused this accident, what factors were involved,” Sheriff Brian Schneck said. CNY Central. “But we’re looking at all the evidence we can.”
Schneck added that investigators have found no evidence that the drivers were drinking alcohol at the time of the crash.
Brian Trumbull said the last time he spoke to his daughters in person, he gave them $100 for admission to an amusement park before they left that morning and encouraged them to “have fun and be well behaved.”
The sisters had recently graduated from high school – Hailey in 2023 and Shelby in 2024 – and were completing the Oswego BOCES cosmetology program, the obituary stated.
The sisters had “tremendous empathy and love” for animals and volunteered with the CNY Cat Coalition.
Just days before their deaths, the girls had rescued two kittens, Smokey and Bandit, who had been thrown out of a car window.
The father revealed that both his daughters were organ donors, and said they always wanted to “help” people in need.
“They touched a lot of people,” Blaine Trumbull told People magazine.
“Everyone who met them loved them. They were so sweet and kind and really smart. They just knew what they wanted to do.”
