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By Joseph Cress and Linda Franz, Sentinel Reporters, September 17, 2006

Last updated: Sunday, September 17, 2006 2:22 AM EDT

Troy Wiser says it was one of most horrific wrecks he has seen in his 18 years as a police officer.

Despite efforts by a tractor-trailer driver and firefighters to extinguish a blaze and free three men from a crashed pickup truck, all three died.

The pickup collided nearly head-on with the tractor-trailer about 2 a.m. Saturday on rain-slicked Route 34 — known as Yates Street — in Mt. Holly Springs.

The impact was so great that the steering wheel was pushed into the back seat of the Ford F-150 and the engine was forced into the cab.

Wiser believes the driver died upon impact, but he says the two passengers were alive when he arrived.

“The passenger in the front seat was trapped,” says Wiser, a Mt. Holly Springs police officer on duty Saturday morning. “His left leg was pinned between the dash and front seat. I could not get him out. I had to back away” because of the flames.

At least two fire extinguishers were used to give the would-be rescuers more time, and they were working to cut the survivors out when the fire flared up in earnest, forcing them to retreat.

“Everybody did an awesome job trying to save the men,” Wiser says.

Wiser says Richard L. Galloway, 56, of South Baltimore Avenue, Mt. Holly Springs, was driving a tractor-trailer south on Route 34, returning the empty trailer to a fruit company about eight miles away after finishing his rounds as driver of the Peach Glen-to-Carlisle supply route.

Galloway had just turned right onto Route 34 from where it splits with Route 94 when he saw the northbound pickup rounding the curve in the wrong lane of travel, Wiser says.

The officer says Galloway applied his brakes and steered left in an effort to avoid a collision, but the rig hit the pickup truck head-on.

The tractor-trailer subsequently struck the stone house at 25 Yates St., causing minor damage to the northwest corner of the 18th century stone structure.

Wiser credits Galloway with preventing significant damage to the house. The rig missed a major structural support by about a foot, the officer says.

Galloway got out of his rig and used his fire extinguisher to try to extinguish the blaze that had broken out in the pickup, Wiser says.

“He emptied its contents, but it blazed up again,” the officer says. “The (pickup’s) gas tank had a hole in it.”

A press release from the coroner’s office says the men in the pickup all suffered multiple traumatic injuries and were pronounced dead at the scene.

Their names are being withheld by the coroner’s office pending positive identification and notification of next-of-kin.

Wiser says the bodies were badly burned and none carried ID. That leads him to believe the men could have been migrant farmworkers, as he seen a pattern of the migrants not carrying identification cards when he has made traffic stops in the past.

Inside the stone house were Erin and John Phelps. They say they were awakened by the impact, ran outside to find a tractor-trailer had struck the house they had just purchased and then rushed back inside to call the fire company.

Built as early as 1758, the house is known as Stonehaven and is one of the oldest homes in Mt. Holly. Over the centuries it has been used not only as a residence but as a jail, as a shelter for Civil War soldiers on their way to Gettysburg and as a restaurant.

Dave Collins, deputy chief of Citizen’s Fire Co. of Mt. Holly Springs, who lives next door to the damaged stone home and across the street from the Ahlstrom paper mill, also was awakened by the crash.

“I honestly thought it was the train picking up empty rail cars at the paper mill,” he says. Then he realized the noise was from a crash and called 911.

Wiser says Collins was one of the men who used a fire extinguisher on the blaze during the effort to rescue the men.

Another neighbor, John Grimes Jr., says “I had just gone to bed when I heard a big bang. I came out of the house to see a tractor-trailer up against the stone house.”

Grimes says the front of the pickup was “just gone.”

When he first looked at the vehicle, he noticed no flames, and he started to return to his house to tell his wife to call 911.

Then he looked back and saw the pickup engulfed in flames.

Though escaping serious injury, Galloway went to the hospital and submitted to a blood-alcohol test — a standard procedure for commercial truck drivers involved in a fatal wreck, Wiser says.

The officer says the tests prove the trucker had no alcohol in his system. “Galloway just wanted to show he was 100 percent clean.”