By CHRISTINA TATU of the New Jersey Herald
A mare that won Grand Champion in a Quarter Horse class at the New Jersey State Fair/Sussex County Farm & Horse Show was killed and another mare that won Grand Reserve Champion in the same show was injured in a chain-reaction collision on the New Jersey Turnpike just hours after the show Friday.
State Police said the crash involving a passenger bus, the pickup truck towing the horse trailer and a tractor-trailer happened shortly before 1:30 p.m. in Milltown, about a mile south of Exit 9.
Mitch Leonarski, a well-known trainer who showed the two horses in the 7:30 a.m. Quarter Horse class at the fairgrounds was driving the horses back to his Williamstown farm when the accident happened.
“I’ve never seen anything like it, or been involved in (an accident),” Leonarski said. “It was very, very bad. I’m just thankful I survived it.”
Leonarski suffered only minor injuries.
The two horses were not so lucky. Keeping Me In Style, a yearling Grand Champion mare, was killed instantly. She suffered a broken leg, back and hip when the tractor-trailer rear-ended the horse trailer, Leonarski said.
“Traffic was at a stop. I stopped behind a bus and there was a tanker truck behind me that couldn’t stop and was out of control. He slammed into me. He was in half my trailer. Basically, the trailer stopped him from killing me,” Leonarski said.
Keeping Me In Style was owned by Constance Jarve, of Bridgeton, and had recently taken the Grand Champion title in two other horse shows in Tampa, Fla., and North Carolina.
Efforts to reach Jarve were unsuccessful Saturday.
The second horse, “Titanic Tessa,” a 4-year-old mare, suffered a jaw injury in the crash. As of Saturday evening, she was being cared for at the New Jersey Equine Clinic in Millstone Township. Tessa is expected to survive, but it’s not clear whether she will show again, Leonarski said.
Donna Puhl, of Ringtown, Pa., owns Tessa. Puhl did not immediately return phone calls seeking comment Saturday.
“When (the tractor-trailer) hit, the back doors of the horse trailer flew open and he drove right up in there,” Leonarski said.
Emergency crews had to sedate Tessa and take her off the trailer using a side ramp, he said.
State Police spokesman Sgt. Julian Castellanos said four people aboard the bus had minor injuries.
Traffic in the southbound truck lanes was halted, causing traffic to back up for about five miles.
Leonarski is a regular at the New Jersey State Fair/Sussex County Farm & Horse Show, and has attended annually for 30 years.
“I’ve been going ever since I was a kid,” he said.
He had planned to bring Tessa back later this week for another show, but doesn’t know if he’ll come back again this year.
The class the two horses were enrolled in was a halter class, where the judge examines the horses’ confirmation.
“They were champions of their breed, you could say,” Leonarski said.
He was unsure how much each horse might be worth.
Fair officials said the animals were probably worth in the upper thousands if they were being trained by Leonarski. He has clients in Florida, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and North Carolina.
Vida VanGorden, a member of the horse show committee, said the judges who judged the early morning Quarter Horse show had left the fairgrounds since the accident. She was unsure how much the horses were worth.
“These were halter horses. They were young, so they haven’t been ridden before,” she said.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
