ABIPA Founders’ Wife Fatally Injured

Staff reports

Greenwood Commonwealth, MS – Jeanie Blair, widow of Dr. Charles Blair, founder of Asheville-Buncombe Institute of Parity Achievement, was fatally injured in an automobile collision with a 105-car train on Sunday morning June 27, 2010. Dr. Blair died in 2009 of cancer. He and Mrs. Blair were the parents of three children.

According to reports, Jeanie Jackson-Blair and her sister Maddie Rucker
were driving from Sunday school held at a church near where the accident
occurred. Mrs. Blair was driving when the southbound train hit the
vehicle on the passenger side. A witness to the accident said that the
car “just didn’t stop, and the train whistle was going full blast!”
according to Leflore County Sheriff Ricky Banks.

Banks said the train operator had seen the car on time but did not
attempt to stop. The operator told deputies that he thought the car was
going to stop for the train – but it didn’t. By the time the operator
realized the car was coming onto the tracks, the brakes couldn’t stop
the momentum of the more than the100 railroad cars. “It knocked the car
over in a ditch by the railroad tracks,” said Banks. The victims had to
be extricated from the vehicle.

“I guess she never saw it coming,” stated Leflore County Sheriff Ricky Banks.

Mrs. Blair’s sister was severely injured and was flown to a Memphis
hospital by Medstat personnel. Her condition is still very critical, and
she is being kept in an induced coma for the present, according to
reports.

A service for Mrs. Blair was held on Monday, July 5, at New Bethel
Baptist Church, in Canton, Mississippi. In lieu of flowers memorials can
be made to the Blair Health Parity Fund at Buncombe County Medical
Society, 304 Summit Street, Asheville, NC 28803.

Liz (Mary), the oldest child of Dr. and Mrs. Blair, recently graduated
from Meharry Medical School in Nashville, Tenn., and is beginning her
residency.