Report: Alcohol played role in triple fatality

? Autopsy results show that a Wichita woman who killed herself and two other women when she crashed her car into a second vehicle while fleeing the Kansas Highway Patrol last month was legally drunk.

Tests on 24-year-old Jennifer Stilley after the Nov. 15 crash showed her blood-alcohol level was 0.18 percent, more than twice the state’s legal limit of 0.08 percent.

A patrolman began chasing Stilley after clocking her car going 83 mph in a 60 mph zone on Interstate 135 in south Wichita.

Stilley exited the highway and, three minutes into the chase, slammed into a vehicle driven by 43-year-old Mia Alberson. Alberson and passenger Peggy King, 44, both died at the scene.

Some of Stilley’s friends told The Wichita Eagle that she had been drinking alcohol at a friend’s birthday party at a south Wichita bar before the accident. But they said they saw her about an hour before the accident and that she didn’t appear to have been drunk.

The autopsy report said Stilley died of blunt head trauma. An initial highway patrol report of the accident said she wasn’t wearing a seat belt.

Her passenger, fiancee Joseph Batemon, was wearing a seat belt, the report said. Batemon, 29, was treated and released following the wreck.

A second passenger in the other car, Teresa Phillips, suffered critical injuries. Phillips, 45, was released from a Wichita hospital earlier this month.

The patrol has not said how fast Stilley’s 2006 Chevrolet Cobalt was going when she hit Alberson’s vehicle other than “her vehicle was traveling at a high rate of speed in an attempt to elude police.”