10 killed in Kentucky crash were headed to wedding in Kalona

Ben Esh says his Mennonite faith is helping him cope with the loss of 10 family members who died in an automobile accident Friday while traveling to a wedding in Kalona.

“I believe that having had God as my father for a long time, it gave me much strength to trust him, that if he allowed it to happen, therefore he gives me strength to accept it,” said Esh, 35, of Milbank, S.D.

Esh was at Sharon Bethel Church in Kalona Friday, awaiting a wedding Saturday of a family friend. He also was waiting for his parents, John and Sadie, and several other family members who were driving from their home in Kentucky.

They never made it.

Officials said a tractor-trailer crossed a median and struck head-on a large van carrying the family around 5:30 a.m. on Interstate 65 about 75 miles south of Louisville, according to the Associated Press.

Trooper Charles Swiney of the Kentucky State Police said 11 people were killed, including the truck driver. Ten of the dead were in the van, including a 4-month-old. A 3-year-old and 5-year-old were injured, he said.

Esh said those in the van included: his parents, oldest brother and that brother's wife and three sons, three of his sisters and a sister's fiance. The two survivors were his nephews and should be OK, he said.

The family is friends of the bride, Lorena Ropp, and also planned to sing at the wedding. The wedding will be held Saturday at Fairview Mennonite Church in Kalona, although church member Ray Yutzy said it will be “bittersweet.”

“We experience joy because of a wedding coming on, and then something like this happens,” he said. “Somehow the joy is mixed with sorrow, and yet there's also a sense of joy in the fact that we know where every member of this family is. We know that they're in the presence of God, and they were ready to die.”

The Esh family was in Kalona two years ago, Yutzy said, and he heard them sing then.

“Just a wonderful, loving Christian family that loved to sing for the Lord,” he said.

Ben Esh said his parents' home about 55 miles southeast of the crash site burned down in December, and they had just moved into a new one built with the help of church members.

John Esh was a pastor, and Ben Esh said his parents passed on to their 12 children the importance of living a Christian life. Ben Esh has two brothers serving missions in Brazil and a sister doing the same in Virginia.

“My father and my mother, they feared the Lord very much most of their lives and they did not live selfishly,” he said. “They lived for the glory of God and lived for the serving of others.”

Esh said he hoped the accident would draw others closer to God.

“I hope ... that people would stop and realize that we all are going to die and that we're going to meet God and it's important that we do so and that our life is in order because we never know when it happens,” he said.