'It Was Very Tragic' — Week After Deadly Lincoln Crash, More Questions Than Answers Remain |

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Flowers ring a tree on Randolph Street where six people died in a car crash last week.

Amanda Karr woke up in her Michigan home the morning of Oct. 2 to a Snapchat sent from hundreds of miles away.

The panorama clip from her son Johnathon Kurth, sent the day before, showed “some kind of event place” with a big TV screen, but it was shot so fast it was hard to tell at first where or what he was doing.

It was the Haymarket's Railyard, Karr would later discover, the same place Cassie Brenner had been hanging out with friends on a Husker gameday before heading out to the bars.

Nick Bisesi had been downtown, too, meeting up with his sister and brother-in-law at a dance club after a day of tailgating with friends and family.

At some point, Brenner, Kurth, Bisesi and three others — Octavias Farr, Jonathan Koch and Ben Lenagh — piled into Kurth’s black 2020 Honda Accord and barreled down Randolph Street, their lives forever linked.

A week later, there are more questions than answers about how and why the car careened off the street east of 56th Street and Cotner Boulevard and into a tree just after 2 a.m. Oct. 2, killing all six occupants in what Lincoln police officials have described as “the worst crash in Lincoln in recent memory.”

“It’s all speculation," Karr said in a phone interview with the Journal Star after she traveled to Lincoln following the crash. "What were they doing over there?"

Five of the victims were from Lincoln, while Lenagh was from Omaha.

Lincoln Police have said little publicly about their investigation into the crash and what led up to it, much of which remains unclear, even to investigators, who were not available for interviews.

“In most crashes we investigate, there’s someone that’s either a witness or involved that we can get some details from,” Capt. Todd Kocian said Wednesday. “Unfortunately, in this case, we do not have that.”

None of the back seat passengers — Bisesi, Lenagh, Koch and Brenner — were buckled in at the time of the crash, police said in the crash report filed Monday. Both Kurth and Farr, the front-seat passenger, were wearing seat belts when the Honda hopped a curb, struck a mailbox and crashed into the tree at an "unknown high rate of speed,” investigators said in the crash report.

Randolph, essentially a minor east-west arterial from between Capitol Parkway and 56th, transitions to a curving neighborhood street east of 56th and dead-ends at Taylor Park, a half-mile from the crash site.

The posted speed limit on Randolph where the crash occurred is 25 mph.

“We’re safe to say speed appears to be a factor in the crash,” Kocian said.

Still, police don’t know exactly how fast the Accord was going, whether drugs or alcohol played a role, whether the driver was distracted or whether the vehicle malfunctioned ahead of the tragic crash.

“These are questions we don’t know the answer to,” Kocian said. “Because, again, we don’t have anybody we can interview. So it’s going to be kind of a battle to figure out exactly what happened. And, quite honestly, we might not know.

“Sometimes you don’t have all the pieces of the puzzle.”

Mo Eisenhauer stayed in that Saturday night but kept up with Brenner, her best friend who was celebrating the Nebraska football team’s victory against Indiana in downtown Lincoln.

“She texted me and she was, like, ‘Hey, are you out?’” Eisenhauer recalled in an interview with the Journal Star. “I told her, ‘No, I didn’t end up going to the Railyard or anything; I stayed at home and watched the game.’

“She was, like, ‘OK, well, I’m at the Railyard now. We’re probably gonna head to bars after.’”

Mourners gather on Randolph Street, which was the scene of a fatal crash that killed six people last week.

Eisenhauer didn’t hear from Brenner again until 12:30 a.m., when the 24-year-old and her roommates — Koch, 22, and Farr, 21 — were at least starting to think about their route home.

“Do you need a way home?" Eisenhauer says she asked Brenner.

“And she was, like, ‘No, I think (Farr) and the others are leaving here soon, so I’ll probably just get an Uber with Octo (Farr) and the rest of the boys.’”

Instead, the three roommates — along with Bisesi, 22, and Lenagh, 23 — ultimately climbed into the car with Kurth, who Eisenhauer said was an acquaintance of their friend group.

At 2:16 a.m., the Honda smashed into the tree outside Brad Bartak’s home on Randolph Street, where he's lived since 1971. He used a rock to break the car’s back window and a garden hose to douse a fire emerging from the engine as first responders rushed to the scene, unsure of what they would find.

It was, at first, unclear how many passengers had been in the car, and whether any were in the car when area residents began calling to report the collision, according to archived emergency scanner traffic.

“(Callers) are unable to locate occupants,” a dispatcher said, later adding that bystanders, with their view shielded by the sedan's curtain airbags, couldn’t tell if there was anyone inside the car at all.

But soon, the devastation became more clear.

“Three or four teenagers in the vehicle,” dispatchers relayed, sending more Lincoln Fire and Rescue responders to the scene, 29 in total.

“They are all unconscious,” a dispatcher said.

Crews extricated the back seat passengers first. Then came Farr. Then Kurth.

Brenner, they said, was the only one still breathing when they reached her. Medics rushed her to a hospital, but the Lincoln woman died late that morning.

The five others died at the scene.

“It hurts," said Misty Goeden, Koch’s aunt who said the 22-year-old was like another son to her. "It hurts to think you’ll never see them again.”

Chris Mannel, a crash reconstructionist who spent 15 years in law enforcement, said "there's no doubt speed was involved," in a crash of this magnitude.

"You really don't see those sorts of injuries if you don't have speed involved," said Mannel, whose company, Nebraska Crash Reconstruction, does consulting work for insurance companies and attorneys while also collecting crash data. "If a car were to hit a building or something else, it would give way ... but a tree, it doesn't move."

Six people died on the morning of Oct. 2 when a sedan crashed into a tree on Randolph Street near 56th in east Lincoln.

The car's airbag module — sometimes called the "black box" — would likely be key to the investigation, especially if there is no video of the crash or witnesses, Mannel said.

The module can provide insight in how fast the car was going in the preceding seconds, but Mannel said it's possible the box was damaged by either the impact or when the car started on fire.

Investigators could also conduct a crush analysis that can measure the extent of the impact and compare it with data from crash tests, according to Mannel. That could "give you a ballpark figure of how fast they were going," he said.

But some questions may simply be unanswerable.

"Obviously, in the years I was still in law enforcement, that's what the family wanted — were the reasons and the answers," Mannel said.

Karr said police believe there may be a video of the crash captured by a doorbell camera, but for the most part, details she's been supplied have been few and far between.

The Eastridge neighborhood in east Lincoln where the crash took place is “nowhere near John’s apartment,” according to his mother, who added that she didn’t know anybody else in the vehicle.

Kurth had moved from western Nebraska to Lincoln to work for BNSF Railway.

“I knew he was trying to put himself out there and meet people,” she said. “He didn’t have family here.”

Kurth would drink on occasion, but Karr said she never saw her son intoxicated.

People gather and lay mementos and flowers Monday at the foot of a tree on Randolph Street, the scene of a fatal crash that killed six people on Oct. 2.

Karr suggested her son may not have been familiar with the complicated intersection where 56th and Randolph streets and Cotner Boulevard converge.

Kurth, she added, may not have known Randolph begins to curve sharply east of 56th, where the ring of bouquets and mementos flanking the crash site continues to grow.

Mourners can be seen contemplating the scene daily, the tree's stripped bark a bleak reminder of that day and the questions that remain.

“Nobody over there knows what happened, nobody saw it happen,” Goeden said. “They just heard it happen, felt the shakes from the tree. And we just — I guess we’re all just waiting for answers.”

The tenth worst state for crash-related deaths is West Virginia, with 16.3 per 100,000 people.