The Friday accident that took the life of an 84-year-old Dahlonega man occurred along a stretch of road Sheriff Stacy Jarrard had warned was slick because of rain and a sheen of oil.
“USE CAUTION ON Highway 52 from Mount Sinai to the bridge near the old Oar House,” Jarrard posted on Facebook. “We have had eight wrecks in that area since last Thursday with one of them resulting in a fatality. The roadway is very slick due to oil on the roadway and the rain.”
The state patrol makes no mention of oil on the road in its preliminary report on the one-vehicle accident.
The report says only a pickup was rounding a curve at the time of the crash and that “the driver (Jack Thomas Wynn) was traveling too fast for the curve and the pickup began to rotate. The pickup traveled off the (road) and overturned before coming to final rest, upright against a tree.”
Wynn’s obituary says he was a former faculty member at North Georgia College (now the University of North Georgia) and was instrumental in starting an Anthropology-Archeology program at the school that continued after he retired in 2015.
Prior to his career in education, Wynn, Ph.D., served as a Forest Archaeologist with the Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forest for more than 20 years, where he directed field archaeology volunteers each summer through the Passport in Time program.
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