Margaret Maurer: Tulane Student Killed by Flying Truck Tire

Margaret Maurer is a Tulane University student killed by a flying truck tire in a freak accident at a rest stop on Interstate 10 in Mississippi, The New Orleans Advocate reports.

Maurer, 21, died after two wheels flew off an 18-wheeler into a rest stop and one of the wheels hit the student. The accident happened near Gautier, where police said the truck’s two wheels skipped across the road and into the rest stop. Police said Maurer and two friends were going to get back in their car after stopping to use the restroom when the truck tire hit her and then smashed into two cars.

Margaret Maurer Was a Newcomb Scholar in Tulane’s Leadership Program for Women

Tulane University officials identified Maurer as a senior studying ecology and evolutionary biology.

Maurer was a Newcomb Scholar in a Tulane leadership program for women students, the school told The Advocate.

Maurer sold plants and crocheted items made of recycled materials at the Green Wave Community Market.

“Sharing [my work] is how I celebrate the power and beauty of women, the freedom of creativity, and the connections between all of us,” she said in a quote on the market’s Facebook page.

She also studied abroad in Ecuador in 2018, according to Tulane.

She was originally from Forest Lake, Minnesota, which is about 30 miles from Minneapolis.

A GoFundMe campaign has been set up to help honor Margaret’s “passions for conservation, plants, language and scholarship.”

Maurer Was Set to Graduate This Spring

Maurer was months away from her graduation at Tulane. After spending a year studying in Ecuador, she raved about how much she learned on the university’s website.

“After spending a semester abroad, I have become so much more sure that my academic and professional goals are headed in the right direction, and after having the opportunity to meet people from all over the world working in my field, I have better connections and a better idea of what my career could look like in a few years!” she said.

“Every weekend I had the chance to get on a bus and explore a different interest: field sketching and learning about traditional ecological knowledge in the Amazon, cooking and hiking in the Andes, dancing and surfing on the coast (actually, I danced pretty much everywhere I went),” she recalled. “I was even lucky enough to visit the Galápagos—something I’ll treasure for the rest of my life. And all along the way, I was learning more and more Spanish than I ever could in a classroom.”

“There are a million differences between my experience living in the United States and Ecuador, but one that I really struggled with was machismo,” she added. “During my time in South America, this took the form of behaviors like catcalling or some kinds of dancing and gesturing that I personally found disrespectful. Despite wanting to react the way I wanted to within my own beliefs and values, I realized that it’s not my culture, it’s not my place; I learned to react the way other Ecuadorian women did, by steadily ignoring really unwelcome advances. I would probably have done this differently in my own culture and country, but by following the examples set by the women around me, I felt that I stayed within respectful cultural bounds and ended up making some really special connections with them.”

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