A College Park couple, married for four months, were killed yesterday when the car they were riding in crossed the median strip of a busy road in Prince George's County and collided with a truck and a school bus, police said.
Ryan H. Easley, 26, a May graduate of the University of Maryland law school, and Melanie E. Easley, 25, were pronounced dead shortly after the 6:50 a.m. crash on Greenbelt Road in College Park, between Rhode Island and 58th avenues, police said.
The school bus in the crash was carrying no students when it slid into an embankment, slightly injuring the driver.
(Robert A. Reeder -- The Washington Post)
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They said the couple, who lived in the 4800 block of Berwyn House Road, were traveling east when their Honda Accord struck a flat-bed utility truck, spun and then hit a county school bus, which was not carrying students.
The bus slid off the road and down an embankment, landing on its side. Police said the driver was cut and bruised and was taken by ambulance to a nearby hospital, where he was treated and released.
The driver of the truck was unhurt.
A team of accident reconstruction investigators combed the scene on the six-lane, heavily traveled thoroughfare, which was closed in both directions for several hours. The cause of the crash remained undetermined last night.
Sgt. Tammy Sparkman, a county police spokeswoman, said Melanie Easley was driving.
Colleagues of Ryan Easley described him as unpretentious and kind.
"I really had the sense that his being in law school was a special thing . . . and he was on his way to making a better life for himself and for others," said Donald G. Gifford, one of Easley's professors. "He was serious, polite, deferential. He got along with people and wasn't loud or frivolous."
Gifford said Easley was expected yesterday morning at the Thurgood Marshall Law Library in Baltimore, where he worked as a research associate.
Easley was among the law school's top graduates, Gifford said, and was recommended by several professors for the post at the library. He said Easley was known among the school's lecturers for a "brilliant" paper he wrote during his last semester about a book called "The Costs of Accidents."
"This isn't being said just because of his passing," Gifford said. "But one had the sense that the more that he went on in life, the more he would've emerged as a really brilliant lawyer or legal scholar."
