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September 28, 1999Salisbury Post; Rowan County, NC

Local News

Happy to be alive
Woman, daughters survive crash; other driver faces charges

BY JENNIFER MOXLEY
SALISBURY POST

           
Donna Gibson and her three girls are doing OK.

Not great, just OK.

Gibson, pregnant with twin girls, and her 3-year-old daughter, Grace, were involved in a three-car collision in July on N.C. 150 in the Mill Bridge community.

Gibson spent two days in the hospital; Grace, 5 1/2 weeks.

Another driver, Janice Marie Campbell, 20, of Lincoln County, died at Carolina’s Medical Center as a result of the accident.

“There was nothing I could have done differently to change the situation,” Gibson said.

But maybe the driver of the third vehicle involved could have.

Brett Gascoigne, 23, 819 Marilyn Court, Concord, has been charged with misdemeanor death by vehicle, a Class 1 misdemeanor which can carry jail time.

If convicted, Gascoigne’s sentence will be based on any record he has and the circumstances of the accident.

Gibson lead the line of three cars down N.C. 150 that Friday afternoon. She was delivering flowers in her minivan.

Gascoigne followed in his orange Asplundh tree-trimming truck. And Campbell was behind both of them in her 1989 Nissan.

N.C. Highway Patrol Trooper W.D.Greene said Campbell attempted to pass the other two vehicles, a legal maneuver since it was a passing lane.

At the same time, Gascoigne moved to pass Gibson, without checking his sideview mirror, Greene said.

The truck and the Nissan collided, swerved across the road and pushed Gibson down the embankment of Kerr Creek bridge.

Campbell’s car landed on its roof in the roadway, and she died later. Gascoigne’s truck flipped over the bridge railing and landed upright in the creek. He suffered minor cuts and bruises.

A tree at the bank of the creek split the front Gibson’s van.

Investigators told Gibson later that if the van had landed “an inch different either way,” she or her daughter would not be alive.

“The power of prayer does a lot,” Gibson said. The accident has given the Gibson family a “new perspective on life.”

The family was on the prayer lists of more than eight churches. “From here to California to Canada,” Gibson said people showed their concern for her family.

But Gibson says no amount of plastic surgery can repair what God made. She and her daughter will always have the scars to remind them of the accident that could have taken their lives just as easily as it took Campbell’s.

“The four of us have something to do here,” Gibson said. “It just wasn’t our time.”

“My daughter and I have a saying,” Gibson said “ ‘We went airborne and God took over.’ ”

 

 

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