Updated: Family, Friends Remember Sand Springs Triple-fatality Crash Victims | News

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Mourners view a makeshift memorial early Friday at the site of a fatal crash involving five Sand Springs high school students the day before.

Kylee Weaver (left) and her mother, Kori Fletcher.

A woman views the site of a Sand Springs crash that killed three Charles Page High School students and injured two others.

A mourner grieves early Friday at a makeshift memorial at the site of Thursday’s fatal crash involving five Charles Page High School students.

Flowers and other mementos form a makeshift memorial at the site of Thursday’s fatal crash in Sand Springs.

Charles Page High School students and others add items Friday to a makeshift memorial at the site of a crash a day earlier that killed three Charles Page juniors and left two others hospitalized.

A floral arrangement at a makeshift memorial to the Charles Page High School crash victims bears the familiar hashtag #Sanditestrong.

A letter from Oklahoma State University student Reagan Conrad to the crash victims rests among items left at a makeshift memorial on Friday. Conrad graduated from Charles Page High School in 2021.

Pictures on a poster left at the memorial show flowers placed on the classroom desks and in the wrestling locker of the students who died in Thursday's crash.

Charles Page High School students and others gather Friday afternoon to leave items at a makeshift memorial to three students who were killed a day earlier in a traffic accident at the site.

Joyce Weaver holds glasses belonging to her granddaughter Kylee Weaver, 16, who was among those killed in the Sand Springs crash Thursday. Weaver noticed the glasses at the memorial while watching a television news video.

A cross reflecting Charles Page High School plus the Sand Springs school district's interlocking double-S logo is among a rapidly growing number of items at a makeshift memorial to the victims of Thursday's deadly traffic accident involving five high school students.

SAND SPRINGS — Three Charles Page High School students who died Thursday in a car crash less than a mile from the school were remembered Friday with tears, gratitude and even laughter by friends and family members.

Sand Springs police on Friday morning identified the Charles Page High School students who were involved in the crash, which also hospitalized two others.

Ethan Gibson, 17; Cyra Saner, 16; and Kylee Weaver, 16, were killed in the crash about 12:15 p.m. Thursday, police said in a news release. All three were riding in the back seat of the car.

Deputy Police Chief Todd Enzbrenner identified the driver as Sirrah Mathews, 16. She and front-seat passenger Logan Childers, also 16, were taken by ambulance to Saint Francis Hospital in Tulsa, police said.

No update on their conditions was available Friday.

The car crashed on Park Road near Colony Circle just south of Sand Springs Lake, Enzbrenner said Thursday. He said the car was eastbound on Park when it failed to negotiate a curve in the road to the southeast and went off the northeast side of the pavement.

Enzbrenner said Mathews was the only person in the car wearing a seat belt. He said speed was “definitely a factor” in the crash, although data that will allow authorities to determine how fast the car was traveling had not been recovered Friday afternoon.

Meanwhile, classmates and relatives streamed to the crash site all day Friday to add flowers, photos and other mementos to a growing makeshift memorial.

Jim Weaver said his granddaughter Kylee Weaver was a good student who had plans for college, and she was always eager to take part in volunteer work with her grandparents, both real-estate agents.

But what he remembers most is that “from the time she was little bitty, she always did things with me,” he said.

His wife, Joyce Weaver, agreed: “She was the apple of his eye. She loved her Papa Jim.”

Jim Weaver said he knew that Kylee hadn’t been heard from by about 3 p.m. Thursday, but then he got a call from a police officer using his daughter’s phone telling him that Kylee was involved in the accident and that she “didn’t make it.”

“I put a post on Facebook that ‘heaven got a new angel,’” he said.

Joyce Weaver, standing next to the memorial and holding a pair of glasses, told about how she had been watching televised news reports the night before about the accident, including scenes from the memorial, when she spotted her granddaughter’s glasses amid the flowers and other items.

Jeanie Blatchford was “trying to stay strong for her,” but the sight of the memorial Friday made the tears flow.

“Her” was Kori Fletcher, the mother of Kylee Weaver and Blatchford’s best friend for 20 years. But to Blatchford, Weaver was “my first baby. I helped raise her. I have always been a part of her life.”

She recalled teaching Weaver, then 4 or 5, how to swim.

The child was begging to be thrown in the water, but Blatchford resisted.

“But she was always so persistent,” she said. “So I picked her up and I launched her in, and she looked like a little turtle. All you saw was the top of her face. She was doggie-paddling as hard as she could.”

Blatchford is worried that her friend Fletcher now needs some help to keep from sinking, and she wants people to know about a GoFundMe that has been set up. It can be found at bit.ly/KyleeWeaverFund.

Student Kaylah Morgan said she had trigonometry class with Weaver.

“We were literally making plans in trig class that morning to hang out sometime soon,” she said.

As Morgan talked, she was holding onto a piece of a broken mirror with letters on it that was found at the crash scene.

She said a friend had given Mathews, the car’s driver, a sticker with the words “You’re important” to put on her rear-view mirror “to remind her to drive safe.”

Junior Ava Durham said she had known Gibson and Saner since elementary school and that she was so glad to have the memorial to visit.

“I love it,” she said Friday. “I’m so glad that all the students can come down here and give flowers or do whatever they need to do.”

And for the day, at least, schoolwork was largely put on hold.

“Today at school, we had pastors, counselors and parents, and they were all set up in the library. It’s just amazing what our community can do to help everyone that’s going through this loss,” Durham said.

“We’ve had an eventful last month at our school with everything that’s happened, and I really hope it just calms down and we’ll go back — I mean, nothing’s going to be normal. Nothing will be normal. But I just pray that school will feel safe again.”

Junior Kilee Waggoner fought back tears as she described the impact Gibson had on her life.

Gibson, a member of the wrestling team, “was supportive for the girls team to be made, and as a former girls wrestler, it means a lot because it’s a sport made for boys,” Waggoner said. “And for guys to be so welcoming, it means a lot to the girls because we have no other support.

“And for him to be gone, it’s not the same,” she said. “But I know that once we get our Sand Springs girls wrestling team made, he would be proud.”

Denise Luce and her daughter Katelynn, an eighth-grader, came to the memorial site to remember Gibson.

Luce, a retired choir and computer keyboarding teacher at Clyde Boyd Middle School, taught Gibson in the sixth grade.

“He was always smiling,” she said. “He’d see me even after he left middle school, and (he’d say), ‘Hey, Mrs. Luce!’ and just smile. He was always super friendly.”

Oklahoma State University student Reagan Conrad “got out of class a little extra early so I could drive down here” to the memorial site on Friday.

She said her sister Paige, a sophomore, was friends with all of the crash victims, “so I got to know them pretty well through her.”

But Conrad came not so much to mourn as to offer gratitude by way of reading aloud a letter she wrote to Gibson, Saner and Weaver to thank them for having such a positive impact on her sister’s life.

“It’s so sad that I never got to say thank you to them in person,” she said. “They were just amazing people.

“They really stepped up and took her under their wing” when Conrad, who graduated from Charles Page in 2021, went to college “and made her feel included, made her feel important, made her feel loved.”

Sophomore Caleb Kelly said in a message Thursday the students involved in the crash were “all real good people; kind-hearted people.”

He said he had known Gibson the best and that “for the two years I knew Ethan and the conversations we had, he was a real genuine person and just down to earth.”

“He would always check up on me, and he always treated his friends like family and would do anything for them,” he said. “Ethan was a very friend- and family-oriented person and always took the time to have a conversation with anyone if they needed it.”

Kelly said he and Gibson met through mutual friends and had a class together.

“My friend was friends with him and (another friend), and he introduced me, and they made me feel welcome, and I just got good ‘vibes’ from him.”

Kelly had not yet been to the memorial at the crash site on Friday afternoon but said he was planning to go Sunday to take some purple and yellow flowers.

Gibson’s favorite color was yellow and Saner’s was purple, he said, and he was “trying to figure out Kylee’s favorite so I can have their favorite colors in flowers.”

A Friday Facebook post from Ponca City Public Schools asked fans traveling to Sand Springs for the Wildcats’ game against the Sandites “to wear gold, gray, black and white ribbons or arm bands (the school colors for Sand Springs) to honor the Charles Page High School students involved in the tragic accident on Thursday.”

The post added, “The Wildcats of Ponca City send prayers for peace and comfort to the entire Sand Springs community.”

Both teams and spectators observed a moment of silence, led by Sand Springs Public Schools Superintendent Sherry Durkee, before the game began.

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“Today our community has suffered a devastating loss. It is with heavy hearts that we confirm the passing of three Charles Page High School students who lost their lives in a traffic accident on the afternoon of Thursday September 15," Sand Springs Public Schools Superintendent Sherry Durkee wrote in a statement released later Thursday.

The visiting Wildcats are reeling from their own tragedy this week: A football player was in a traffic accident Monday night and was airlifted to an Oklahoma City hospital, where he is recovering.

An assistive listening system at City Hall is helping Beau Wilson find new ways to work after a devastating traffic accident.

About 40 students stage a walkout one day after cards bearing the phrases “White Privilege Card” and “Trumps Everything” were handed out among white students.

“When it first happens to you, you feel so isolated, but the more people who come out, you realize, ‘I’m not alone at all,’” said Paige Ryan, whose son, Jacob, was stillborn in 2018.

Entry forms for the annual downtown parade are due no later than Tuesday, Sept. 20.

Eight to 10 Charles Page High School students walk out of classes to draw attention to what they say is the school district’s insufficient response to a pair of racially tinged incidents in the first two weeks of classes. #oklaed

The exhibit runs through Oct. 20 at the Sand Springs Cultural and Historical Museum.

The Sept. 17 event will bring more than 50 arts and crafts vendors from across Oklahoma to the Case Community Center in Sand Springs, however.