I-70 crash kills Maize grads

Two recent Maize High School graduates were among three people killed in a two-vehicle crash early Wednesday on I-70 in north-central Kansas.

Kylie Jobe, 20, and Kyle Thornburg, 22, were headed east on I-70 when their Chevy Equinox was hit just before 2 a.m. by a Ford F150 pickup coming west in the eastbound lanes. The accident happened about five miles east of Wilson in Ellsworth County, according to a Kansas Highway Patrol report.

The driver of the pickup, 27-year-old Joseph Pena of Corpus Christi, Texas, also was killed, according to the report.

He had left Corpus Christi at 5:30 a.m. Tuesday for a pipe-fitting job with a refinery in Denver, according to his sister, Cynthia Jordan.

Jobe and Thornburg were returning from a family ski trip in Colorado. According to Thornburg's Facebook page, they had been a couple since 2006.

"She was coming home to get ready to go back to Oklahoma State," said Jay Holmes, who was Jobe's soccer coach at Maize High. Jobe was a sophomore at Oklahoma State and a member of the Gamma Phi Beta sorority.

Trooper Josiah Trinkle said there is no evidence that Pena had been drinking or that he fell asleep and his pickup drifted across the wide grassy median into the eastbound lanes.

"I'm assuming he got off somewhere along the way" to sleep, eat or use the bathroom "and when he got back on he used the wrong ramp," Trinkle said.

Neither driver hit the brakes prior to impact, the trooper said.

Both of Jobe's parents are well known in the Wichita business community. Her mother, Barby, is vice president for government relations at the Wichita Metro Chamber of Commerce. Her father, Mike, is executive director of the South YMCA.

"She had such an outgoing personality that allowed her to develop so many long-standing friendships and relationships with people," Holmes said of Jobe.

"That's a huge loss, not only to her family but to our community," he said. "She was a good sister and teammate, a dedicated student and athlete. She was the entire package."

Dillon Ayres, a high school friend of Jobe's, said he will miss her smile and personality the most.

"She had a smile that would light up the room and was one of the nicest persons I've ever met," Ayres said.

After graduating from Maize, Thornburg studied at Kansas State University and then transferred to Butler Community College.

He was working at UPS and had just moved into a house with a friend two weeks prior to his death, said Jesse Steele, a UPS supervisor.

"Kyle was one of the most easygoing guys I've ever met," Steele said in an e-mail. "He personally taught me life's (too) short to live it angry. He was the kind of guy that if you didn't like him, then there was something wrong with you."

Thornburg was a hard worker who had real goals and ambition, Steele said — unusual for someone who is 22. But he was loyal to family and friends as well.

"There wasn't a thing not to like about him," Steele said.

Pena was born and raised in Corpus Christi, earned a degree in graphic design at Upper Iowa University, and thought nothing of taking jobs hundreds of miles away to support his wife and two young children, his sister said.

"He came from a very close-knit family who are nothing but hard workers," Jordan said.

This story was originally published March 24, 2011 at 12:00 AM with the headline "I-70 crash kills Maize grads."