Banks remembers teen’s ‘spirit’

Family struggles to make sense of details surrounding accident that took Kaylee Tawzer’s life

By Nancy Townsley

The Forest Grove News-Times, Sep 26, 2007, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (3 Reader comments)

Kaylee Tawser

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Sixteen-year-old Kaylee Tawzer was a vivacious girl with beautiful green eyes and a deep spirituality about her.

“I always felt like I could see eternity in her eyes,” said her mother, Kathy Tawzer of Hillsboro.

The Banks High School junior died Sept. 15, the morning after she was involved in an auto collision north of Forest Grove.

While Kaylee was attempting to turn south onto Highway 47 from Verboort Road, a heavy farm fuel truck plowed into the driver’s side of her Toyota Corolla. She was wearing a seat belt and her car’s airbags deployed, but Kaylee suffered extreme head trauma in the accident.

“She didn’t have a chance,” Kathy Tawzer said two days after her daughter’s funeral. “At the hospital I lifted her eyelids and there was nothing there. She was already brain dead.”

New driver

Kaylee was a new driver who, her mother concedes, could have misjudged the speed the truck was traveling.

“We all worked so diligently with her,” Kathy said. “We talked about careful driving just the night before the accident.”

Her family members — all of whom returned to the crash site last Wednesday to see for themselves what might have transpired — believe Kaylee didn’t see the white and silver truck that crumpled her red sedan around 3:30 p.m. on Sept. 14.

“The only thing I know is, she was a cautious driver,” Kathy Tawzer said.

She thinks a traffic light at the treacherous corner might have slowed Kaylee down long enough for her to pause a few more seconds and see the truck coming from the south.

While she stood at the intersection, reliving the circumstances of her daughter’s death, Kathy Tawzer said cars and trucks whizzed by at 70 miles per hour.

Almost no one was traveling at 45 mph, the posted speed.

“The only anger I have is that had there been a stoplight there, my daughter could still be here,” a sobbing Kathy said. “She wouldn’t have run a light.”

The sun was just beginning to set beyond the Coast Range on that late summer day. Its glare likely obscured Kaylee’s vision, her mother said, preventing her from making a safe left-hand turn.

“It created this blinding light,” noted Kathy, who returned to the intersection with her husband, Troy, her mother, Allonna Chapple, and Kaylee’s siblings: Karissa, 24, Ashly, 23, Jarron, 22, and Chiami, 18.

“There needs to be a light there to get people to stop,” Kathy said. “I just know Kaylee would want something done so no one else has to die.”

‘Closer than twins’

The tight-knit family, all members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, has only begun to process Kaylee’s death.

Even though they were two years apart, Kathy said, Kaylee and Chiami, who graduated from Banks High last spring, were “closer than twins.”

The news of Kaylee’s death sent shock waves through the small community of Banks that rippled into Hillsboro, where the Tawzers live and attend church.

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