‘Any other morning it would be different, but it’s just the day that’s taken their life. It’s terrible.’
When Jim Madden, 81, and his wife Carmel, 80, were killed by a careering truck about 7am on Friday, they were in the bedroom of their in Tower Hill home, near Warrnambool.
But one friend has revealed that the elderly couple would not usually have been in the bedroom at that time of day — Jim would have already been outside training horses.
In a tragic twist of fate, Carmel was home after a recent stay in hospital, and Jim was at home caring for her.
“Any other morning it would be different, but it’s just the day that’s taken their life. It’s terrible,” family friend Sue Lane told 7NEWS.
“Carmel and Jimmy were good people. They always tried their hardest to do whatever they could.”
The truck had been travelling eastbound on a “dead straight” section of the Princes Hwy from Port Fairy to Warrnambool when it veered onto the wrong side of the road, Victoria Police sergeant Stephen Hill said.
It crashed through the wire fence of a paddock and travelled about 200m before smashing through another fence and ploughing into the brick home.
“There’s no reason for vehicles (travelling on the highway) to swerve unless they’re overtaking, but how and why and what was going on inside the truck that caused the collision is something that we will just have to look at over time,” Hill said.
“Clearly there’s a real question given the length of the rolling tyre prints through the paddock as to how the driver wasn’t able to stop the truck prior to colliding with the house.”
Hill said witnesses did not suggest any reasons for the truck driver to swerve off the road, and it was unclear why the driver did not hit the brakes before crashing into the home.
“It’s sort of hard to fathom what actually has happened because it doesn’t make any sense at all that a bloody great big B-double truck on a dead straight part of the highway can do what it did,” local business owner Richard Crawley.
The 70-year-old truck driver from Portland was taken to Warrnambool Hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.
Tower Hill is made up of just 100 people, according to the 2021 census, and the farming community there has been struggling to comprehend the loss.
“It’s been really hard. It’s like losing parents,” Lane told 7NEWS through
“We’ll pull ourselves through because we know Jimmy and Carmel would want us to.”
The Madden family released a statement of the same sentiment: “Jim and Carmel devoted their life to their family and have given us all so many opportunities and were immensely proud of us all.”
“As hard as it may be for everyone, they would want us and all their valued friends, the Tower Hill and Koroit communities, and all those in the farming and racing industry to continue working to make the world a better place.”
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