COLUMBUS, Ohio – It was a race against time that police and Virginia White lost.
READ MORE: In the Columbus Dispatch
Police were zeroing in on the elderly motorist in the minutes before she was involved in a wrong-way crash on I-670 Tuesday night that killed her and critically injured another driver.
White, 80, had dementia and had been deemed a “high-risk missing person” by police in Gahanna earlier in the evening, but officers had not been able to locate her, according to a report in Thursday’s Columbus Dispatch..
The description of White’s 2004 Buick Regal also had been displayed on some of the Ohio Department of Transportation sign boards before the crash occurred.
“Gahanna had been looking for her since I believe about 5 o’clock,” said Sgt. Brooke Wilson, supervisor of the Columbus police Accident-Investigation Unit.
He said detectives have not yet determined where White got on the freeway and how long she had been driving in the wrong direction, but police dispatch records indicate she was somewhere in the Downtown the area shortly before the crash.
White died at 1:42 a.m. Wednesday at OhioHealth Grant Medical Center, where she was taken following the 8:24 p.m. crash in the westbound lanes of I-670 at I-71.
Police said White was driving east in the westbound lanes when she collided with a Ford Taurus driven west by Hannah Miller, 21. The impact sent Miller’s car spinning into a westbound Kia minivan driven by Christopher Harden, 48.
Miller also was taken to Grant, where she remains in critical condition.
Harden and his two passengers, Anna Harden, 12, and Sidney Tackett, 13, were not injured.