4-Year-Old Boy Survives Crash That Claims Lives of Parents

A 4-year-old boy survived a crash on Highway 26 that claimed the lives of his parents. The three-car crash also killed one of the other drivers.

It happened Monday afternoon around 4 p.m. near milepost 86 on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation.

Oregon State Police say that 37-year-old Adam Clausen of Portland was driving a 2006 Toyota Matrix westbound. In the passenger seat was 39-year-old Shannon O'Leary. In the backseat, their 4-year-old son.

As they were driving, a 2007 Chevrolet Malibu being driven by 31-year-old Nathan Verhaeghe of Spokane came up on them at a high rate of speed and bumped into the Toyota, forcing it into the eastbound lane. There, it was struck by a 2013 Chrysler driven by 34-year-old Robert Burke of Reno.

Clausen, O'Leary and Burke were all killed in the crash.

Burke's passenger, 29-year-old Rachel Burke, was transported by air ambulance to St. Charles Medical Center in Bend with serious injuries, as was their 22-month-old child who was in the backseat. The 4-year-old from Clausen's car was taken to the same hospital.

Vergaeghe, who only suffered minor injuries, was also brought to St. Charles in Bend.

Speed and other contributing factors are being investigated as causes, according to the state police.

Leary and Clausen were both well-known in Portland's science community.

O'Leary had spent the past five years on the faculty of Lewis & Clark College where she is an assistant professor of physics. The school says that she had been working on building an experimental quantum optics laboratory.

"With support from the Research Corporation for Scientific Advancement, she is working with Lewis & Clark undergraduate students to study quantum mechanical interactions of laser light with atomic vapor, with an eye towards building a sensitive magnetometer based on these fundamental processes," according to her biography.

She got her bachelor's degree from the University of Puget Sound and a master's and Ph.D. from the University of Oregon.

Clausen worked as a technology consultant at Kolisch Hartwell in Portland.

Before that he spent eight years as a physics professor, teaching at University of Puget Sound, Lawrence University, University of Portland and Lewis & Clark.

His company biography said that he also attended graduate school at the University of Oregon where he "studied general relativity, in particular model cosmological solutions to Einstein’s equations.

"By examining the behavior of these model universes, scientists gain insight into the behavior of our own universe, where it came from, and where it may be going."

Photos: Clausen (Kolisch Hartwell); O'Leary (Lewis & Clark College)