Victim remembered as caring
Susan Kilgore was a mother, a sister, a fiancée. She crafted blankets for children and made soup for the residents of a Shawano nursing home.
Those were the positive ways she coped with a difficult life, showing the caring and compassion that her family remembers three years after her death. Those also are the memories that sharpen their sense of loss and injustice.
Kilgore was struck by a minivan while walking drunk on a dark, rural highway, on Nov. 6, 2005.
"I've gone down there a million times to try to figure out what could have happened, or why she would have been there," said her fiancée, Lee Owen, who lived with Kilgore in Bowler.
According to the sheriff's reports, Kilgore, then 37, started to walk south on U.S. Highway 45 around 11 p.m., after her car broke down south of Antigo. She had on a dark coat and dark boots and walked in the outer traffic lane. A coroner later measured her blood-alcohol level at 0.196, more than twice the legal limit for a driver.
"I suppose she was trying to walk to the nearest house or bar or whatever to call somebody," said Elizabeth Singh, a stepsister who lives in Milwaukee. "I don't think she was thinking right. I think she just wanted to get home."
The driver of a southbound van told authorities he saw something dark in the roadway, and he was unable to avoid the fatal collision.
Listening to a police scanner in his home about 15 miles away, Owen heard the report of the abandoned car and recognized Kilgore's license plate. He alerted Kilgore's stepmother, Beverly Ellwart, who rushed to find her daughter. When Ellwart arrived at the crash scene, a sheriff's deputy stopped her with the warning: "You don't want that to be your last impression."
She identified the body as her daughter based on the I.D. card authorities found.
Langlade County authorities found no wrongdoing on the van driver's part, but Kilgore's family filed a wrongful death claim against him in June. The case is pending.
The driver's attorney contends that Kilgore's bad decisions made her solely responsible for the tragedy. And he says Kilgore wasn't the only victim. The driver of the car was so shattered that to this day he has shared what happened only with his immediate family.
Born with spina bifida, Kilgore dealt with disabling back problems all her years. She struggled to find work - she couldn't sit or stand for long periods of time - and battled alcohol problems.
In 1993, she crashed her truck while driving two girls, ages 16 and 17, according to a criminal complaint. Kilgore told a deputy she was drunk at the time, and the girls said the older woman had shared wine with them. She was convicted on four counts, two for causing injury while driving drunk and two for providing the wine.
In 1997, she was convicted of fleeing the scene of an accident after she rear-ended a car, then drove away.
Owen said Kilgore had curbed her problem with alcohol over the last two years of her life.