Dec. 6 (UPI) -- A bus carrying a high school girls basketball team collided head-on with a tractor-trailer on Interstate 74 near Downs, Ill., Wednesday night, killing two adults and sending several members of the squad to a hospital with non-life threatening injuries.
The crash happened at about 8:30 p.m. in the westbound lane of the highway at mile post 137, 10 miles southeast of Bloomington, according to Illinois State Police. The bus carried the Normal West High School junior varsity basketball team returning from a game in Champaign, WLS-TV reported.
Police stated that the tractor-trailer was traveling the wrong way on the highway when the crash happened but officials were still investigating how that happened. The 34-year-old driver of that vehicle, whose name was not released, died.
Charles Crabtree, 72, a volunteer with the Normal West basketball team, also died in the collision, WMBD-TV reported. A representative at OSF HealthCare said four students from the bus were treated at OSF St. Joseph Medical Center in Bloomington and three adults at St. Francis Medical Center in Peoria.
The hospital said that the students were listed in good condition. Doctors listed one of the adults treated at St. Francis in critical condition and the two other adults in serious condition. One of those was the tractor-trailer driver who later died, The Pantagraph newspaper reported.
"Whenever you hear there's a bus accident, your stomach stops, and you just hope everyone is OK," McLean County Unit 5 spokeswoman Dayna Brown said in a news conference about the crash. "That wasn't the case tonight. We never want that to be the story we have to tell."
The incident marked the second deadly bus crash involving a youth team within a week. Early Monday, a bus carrying a youth football team from Memphis overturned on a freeway in Arkansas, killing one of the players.
The bus was transporting the team from Dallas, Texas, back home after participating in a tournament over the weekend. The crash injured 45 passengers.
