ATV rollover kills 22-year-old student pilot
April 13th, 2010 by Kurt Niland
A 22-year-old student helicopter pilot was killed early Sunday morning when the all-terrain vehicle she was driving rolled over. Reports say that Aura Corina Dacin, who friends described as a free spirit, “wild child” and thrill seeker, was driving the ATV at Oakland-Troy Airport in Troy, Michigan, when the rollover occurred.
According to Troy Police, Dacin was out riding ATVs with her flight instructor Saturday night when she hit a cement pad just before 1 a.m., causing the rollover. Dacin was ejected from the vehicle and hit her head. The ATV then landed on top of her.
Dacin was taken to Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, where doctors pronounced her dead just before 2 a.m. The Oakland County Meidcal Examiner’s Office said the official cause of death was head trauma. Dacin was not wearing a helmet when the accident occurred.
Dacin’s friend, Tracy Freeland, who graduated from Utica High School with her in 2006, said that Dacin liked to ride motorcycles and had considered joining the Air Force.
“She was a wild child. She just wanted to laugh and have fun,” Freeland told the Free Press. “She wanted to fly.”
Police are currently investigating whether alcohol played a factor in the ATV crash.
According to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, 816 ATV-related fatalities occurred in 2007, the agency’s most recent annual estimate. The federal government does not include side-by-side vehicles such as the Yamaha Rhino and certain Polaris models in its ATV estimates, so the fatalities linked to all off-road vehicles would be much higher.
The Free Press report says that Dacin was driving a quad, which the driver straddles – an ATV according to government classification.
The CPSC has reported a 53 percent increase in the number of ATV deaths from 1999 to 2007. The agency also estimates that about 135,000 people were treated in emergency rooms for injuries caused by an ATV crash, compared with 81,800 in 1999 – a 65 percent increase. One-fifth of all ATV deaths involved children.