GARRETT FORK — A head-on collision left one Garrett Fork man dead and another injured and caused two additional wrecks on U.S. Route 119 Saturday morning.

The crash happened just before noon at the mouth of Garrett Fork when 83-year-old Charles “Charley” Adair of Garrett Fork, pulled his Ford Taurus out of the Thornhill Ford car lot and headed north in the southbound lanes of U.S. 119.

Adair, according to eyewitnesses at the scene, had been to the car lot seeking an inspection sticker for his car and was told to go to another car lot just up the highway.

The witness said Adair turned out of the car lot and into the north bound lanes and into the path of a rock truck, driven by Michael Farley, of Chapmanville.

The truck ran up onto Adair’s car and knocked it a lengthy distance from the car lot intersection.

The Taurus came to rest in the grassy median, while the truck came to rest just down from the intersection.

Crews worked to extricate Adair from the wreckage, using the Jaws of Life, and Healthnet was called in, but, after the helicopter circled the crash site and as the emergency crews loaded Adair onto an ambulance, the copter lifted back into the air and left, never touching down.

The ambulance then took Adair to Logan Regional Medical Center where he was pronounced dead.

Farley was not injured in the crash. His rock truck, however, appeared to be totaled.

The head-on collision resulted in two additional crashes that sent another man to LRMC for treatment of minor injuries. A total of five vehicles were involved in the three crashes. Another truck traveling along with Farley’s slammed on its brakes and skidded into the guardrail.

“This old man pulled out and started down 119 northbound in the southbound lanes,” Wayne Toppings, the drive of the rock truck that hit the guardrail, said. “He just pulled out right there and there was no where (for Farley) to go. He ran over top of him. We locked them up and started scooting to keep from hitting him, but he’d done run over him. There was no where to go. I was two truck-lengths behind.”

Toppings said the rock trucks were on their way back home to Chapmanville after dumping a load of gravel at Progress Coal in Madison.

After traffic was stopped in both lanes of U.S. 119, an 18-wheel coal truck traveling northbound was unable to stop and the rig hit a Chevrolet S-10 pickup truck in the driver’s side. The driver of the pickup truck suffered minor injuries and was treated at LRMC, according to Cpl. B.D. Cobb of the Logan County Sheriff’s Department.

“Then, the other truck came off that hill over there and there was no one to let him know traffic was stopped over here,” Toppings said of the third crash. “There was nobody flagging traffic, so what are you going to do?”

Cobb and Logan County Sheriff’s Deputy Joey Sheppard are the investigating officers. Chapmanville Police Patrolman D.A. Browning also assisted with the investigation.

Both lanes of U.S. Route 119 near the Garrett Fork intersection were closed off for more than an hour while crews extricated Adair and cleared the scene of the vehicles and debris. Traffic was held up a few minutes longer as the emergency crews awaited the arrival of Healthnet, as it was set to land on the four-lane highway.

The Chapmanville Volunteer Fire Department responded with several trucks and the Jaws of Life, while the Logan Emergency Ambulance Service Authority responded to the crash with at least three ambulances. The Department of Transportation and the West Virginia State Police also responded to the crashes.

In an unrelated accident, Robert Clark, 61, of Holden, died in a single-vehicle crash in Boone County. The crash happened just a short time before the fatality at Garrett Fork.