CARMEL, Maine (AP) -- Seven people died when their rented SUV veered out of control and went airborne while passing other cars on Interstate 95. It was one of the deadliest highway crashes in Maine history.
Two women and a child were fatally thrown from the Ford Explorer, while its other four occupants - believed to be two children, a woman and possibly a teenager - died inside. Three of the dead were children under the age of 10.
The Explorer went out of control Sunday afternoon after clipping one of the cars it was trying to pass, said Stephen McCausland, spokesman for the Maine Department of Public Safety.
It then turned sideways, became airborne, slammed into some trees in the median and came to rest on its roof, he said. The accident took place some 10 miles west of Bangor.
The Explorer had out-of-state plates, but he would not specify which state. He said the vehicle had been rented in Maine by a Maine resident earlier in the day.
``We're making progress on the identifications,'' he said Sunday night. ``We know who rented the vehicle, and the troopers are fairly confident that that person was one of the victims.''
Firefighters equipped with chain saws cut down some of the trees in which the SUV was wedged so that it could be righted and removed. Police had no immediate estimate as to how fast the Explorer was going, but McCausland said it was traveling at a high rate of speed.
Troopers quoted witnesses as saying one car was in the travel lane and another was passing it in the passing lane when the Explorer came up quickly from behind.
``They told the troopers that the Explorer came up initially at a high rate of speed in the passing lane and then veered into the breakdown lane and passed both, clipping one of them,'' McCausland said.
Skid marks from the out-of-control SUV were visible across the roadway in both lanes, he said.
The crash was the deadliest on a Maine public road since seven occupants of a car were killed when it was broadsided and run over by a tractor-trailer in Richmond on Sept. 5, 1958.
The state's worst crash ever occurred on a privately owned logging road on Sept. 12, 2002, when 14 migrant workers perished when their van went off a bridge in the Allagash Wilderness Waterway.
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