Deadly Halloween crash shakes small town in Mississippi
CHUNKY, Miss. — Every Halloween in the rural eastern Mississippi hamlet of Chunky, families and groups of friends load costumed children onto flatbed trailers and drive from house to widely spaced house for trick-or-treating.
It’s how things have been done for as long as Joyce Reynolds, the co-owner of a local trading post, can remember. On Monday night, a pickup truck slammed into the back of a small utility trailer carrying 10 people on a dark stretch of two-lane highway just outside Chunky, killing a mother and her two young daughters and severely injuring seven other Halloween revelers.
“Most everybody stays in the city limits where the lights are on,” Reynolds, whose own children and grandchildren rode golf carts for trick-or-treating, said Tuesday. “What was unusual was them driving out Highway 80 where it was dark.”
The crash happened after sunset on a stretch of two-lane U.S. 80 that has no street lights.