MCKEE - Police have identified the other drivers involved in a fatal Thursday car crash as the 23-year-old victim's relatives prepared for her Monday funeral, scheduled less than a week before her wedding.
A Freedom Township officer said Dennis Butler Jr. of Altoona was the injured driver of a 1994 Ford pickup truck that apparently collided with Victoria Brooke Lingenfelter's Pontiac Grand Am on a rain-soaked stretch of Route 36.
Butler was hospitalized and since released, police said, while his passenger's condition is unknown. A third driver, John Querry of Martinsburg, was reportedly uninjured.
Lingenfelter was making a return trip from an Altoona seamstress's home, where she and her sister had picked up the wedding dress and a bridesmaid's dress for her wedding next Saturday.
"I was lucky to be the last person to get to tell her I love her," her older sister, Jessica, said Saturday.
She and Victoria said their goodbyes at 7:05 p.m. Ten minutes later, police said, the Duncansville woman suffered fatal injuries in the three-vehicle crash.
Relatives were left to plan a funeral in place of a wedding - Lingenfelter will be buried in her wedding dress, her sister said.
"Mom and Dad have never seen her in it," Jessica Lingenfelter said.
Friends, relatives and other mourners quickly flooded a Facebook page belonging to Lingenfelter's fiance, Rodger Knisely of Roaring Spring, with condolences.
Knisely was mourning with Lingenfelter's loved ones in Duncansville on Saturday, her sister said.
"He's in our family now," she said. "They were very, very, very much in love."
The couple already had an East Freedom-area house prepared for their married life.
"They were ready to move in the day after the wedding," she said.
The St. Francis University nurse-practitioner student and Bishop Guilfoyle graduate was an avid hunter and horse rider, her sister said. Lingenfelter had hoped to go bowhunting the morning of her wedding - a plan relatives scuttled when they reminded her of a scheduled hair appointment.
And she'll be buried, her sister said, in the cowboy boots she'd planned to wear at her wedding ceremony.
"She was just a little country girl," Jessica Lingenfelter said. "She was the light of the party."
Mirror Staff Writer Ryan Brown is at 946-7457.
