:: My heart is heavy for the family of Charlie Gillis, a KU student who was killed last week in yet another crash involving a big rig.
Gillis, 20, was returning to KU from his hometown of St. Louis on Monday when a 2015 Freightliner truck (don’t know if a trailer was attached) pulled out in front of his 2001 Chevy SUV at 166th Street and State Avenue (U.S. 24) in Leavenworth County.
Charlie Gillis
Gillis’ vehicle struck the middle axle of the truck, spun and then careened into a 2016 Ford van. Gillis was taken to KU Medical, where he was pronounced dead on Tuesday.
Neither the 63-year-old truck driver nor the 22-year-old van driver was injured.
Gillis had been in St. Louis for homecoming weekend at his high school, the Mary Institute and Saint Louis Country Day School (MICDS).
His obituary, which appeared in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, said in part…
Charlie was a talented artist and an accomplished athlete with a bright and curious mind. He played football, captained the track and field team and was an All-State pole vaulter in high school…His heart was enormous, and he loved his friends and family far and wide. Whether scaling a tree, strumming his ukulele, vaulting over a pole or careening down a ski slope, he lived in the moment with an unwavering sense of freedom, fearlessness, passion and joy.
Survivors include his parents Jack and Jenn Gillis, brothers Matt and Henry and sister Sara.
What a horrible, thoroughly avoidable loss…The ubiquitousness of these big rigs has me avoiding the interstates and other major roads as much as possible. Those truckers fly along like they’re kings of the road, and sometimes, if you’re not going fast enough to please them, they’ll bear down on your bumper to intimidate you and push you to go faster. A trucker did that to me one night this summer on an interstate in Des Moines — loomed within feet of my bumper. I gripped the steering wheel and accelerated to a speed I was uncomfortable with before he veered off at the junction of another highway. Then, I exhaled deeply.
Charlie Gillis, 20 years old. Didn’t make it to official adulthood. Didn’t live to graduate from college. Won’t get to ski down one more hill. Taken from his family and friends because of the careless action of a big-rig driver.
The crash is “under investigation.”
:: I saw City Councilman Lee Barnes Jr. at a Friends of the Library event last night at the main library. We got to talking about the new airport, and he told me he thought the price tag would ultimately rise to $2 billion. The initial estimate was $1 billion, but Edgemoor, the selected contractor, recently upped it to $1.4 billion after more gates were added.
Barnes, who supported the proposal of AECOM, the world’s largest airport contractor, also said he thought we’d end up with an unremarkable terminal. “Cookie cutter?” I asked. He nodded.
Lee Barnes Jr.
I sure hope he’s wrong, but, as I’ve said all along, once the mayor and council decided to accept open-ended proposals from four contractors, instead of commissioning a design and then advertising for construction bids to execute the design, the city effectively ceded control of the project to the contractor. We’re basically at Edgemoor’s mercy.
:: At the Brookside Price Chopper this evening, I saw a woman with several plastic bags of groceries at the service counter, going through the bags and picking out certain items to return. It appeared she had bought more than she could pay for and was trying to get the bill within her available cash. While the lady selected items, three small children — apparently hers — clambered around the grocery cart and chattered happily.
It was not pleasant, watching the woman scale back her purchases. But at the very end, something struck me as incongruous. On the bottom level of the cart was a 24-pack of bottled water. She looked at it, pulled it off the cart and put it on the counter. That put her under her cash limit.
I sympathize with the woman’s financial situation, but bottled water? Presumably, she has running water at home. No, it’s not free, but she doesn’t have to pay extra for it.
JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC 
If they don’t build it, they can’t steal from it.
Prayers and condolences to the family and friends of Charlie Gillis.🙏🏽✝️❤️🌹🇺🇸
OK, I feel a rant coming on. Sorrow, many sorrows. The heartbreak about which you write is absolutely real — and, like gun deaths, a result of greed leading to bad policy and the stifling of imagination. In the case of hiway deaths, it goes back to the failure to imagine a safer transportation and distribution system. The hiways the private car has produced are like cancers on the skin of the planet, Think as late as Eisenhower’s Defense Secretary Charles Wilson, aptly misquoted as saying, “What’s good for General Motors is good for the country” and the half-trillion dollar Interstate. Taking oil from the ground where God put it has caused wars and international turmoil (one oft-forgotten example is Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran — another indelible example: the American bases in Saudi Arabia which led to 9/11). Oil is bespoiling the air we breathe and heating up the planet. Plastic wastes are menacing the ocean. We have yet to develop the vision to see how all things are interconnected, how as the Bible says, the love of money is the root of all evil. 1 Timothy 6:10: “For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.”
Airport construction is a huge sector of the entire construction industry. And the selection of the contractor is always important. Besides the local politicians they have to answer to the airlines whose customers foot the bill. But, despite pressure from both to not build a Taj Mahal no contractor wants to build an ugly cookie cutter New Terminal. Because it can ruin their reputation in a HUGE industry.
I hope, in the end, Edgemoor will be more motivated to leave a lasting mark with the new KCI than cutting corners and increasing profit.
Good point, Richard…
The Gillis item reminds me of the sons of a co-worker at The Post who were killed in a truck/car crash in 2009. http://www.stoneandholtweeksfoundation.org/
Thanks, Steve…Here’s another story about those brothers — Stone and Holt Weeks — who died in a crash in Virginia. They were returning to their Maryland home from Rice University in Houston. The loss of life is magnified when it involves young people just launching their adult lives.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/30/AR2009073003984.html
There could be several reasons why that poor lady was trying to buy bottled water. Maybe she has had her water shut off. Or maybe her water line is polluted. Gas stations in bad parts of town are notorious for poor maintenance of their gas tanks, which means that petrol can easily leak and get into water lines.
Of course, but if the water was a desperate need, I think she would have pulled other items back. A lot of people just buy bottled water because they’re under the mistaken impression it’s better than tap water.
Remember when Coors wasn’t available here and everybody just had to have it because, obviously, it was the best? Everyone was mesmerized by those ads that billed it as being brewed with “pure Rocky Mountain spring water”?
People would bring back cases of it from vacations in Colorado…Evian and some of the other water companies are just as convincing.
I am told that the driver of the truck was Dale E. Fryman, an on-duty employee of Leavenworth County. Fryman was driving north in the truck on 166th Street. He began crossing U.S. 24-40, allegedly pulling out in front of a sport utility vehicle that was driving west on on US 24. I have to wonder why Gillis was on US 24 instead of I-70. Maybe he thought it would be safer. Survivors live with the memories forever — I still mourn the loss of a neighbor child at age 19, his car struck by a train a quarter-mile from our house.
Fryman is right, Peg…His name is in the report, but the fact that he is a Leavenworth County employee is not.
I also wondered why he was westbound on State Avenue/U.S. 24, when the fastest route obviously would have been I-70. I feel sure there’s a simple explanation, though. Something took him a little farther north.
didn’t want to pay the turnpike toll.
God, I hope you’re wrong, Mike, but the theory makes a lot of sense…Young college student, probably with limited funds, looking to save a couple of bucks.
“Something took him a little farther north.” “…a simple explanation …”
Fate?