Boyfriend came upon deadly crash minutes later
KENTWOOD, Mich. (WOOD) – After she was killed in a crash with a driver fleeing police, Tara Oskam’s boyfriend is left to wonder what difference a couple of minutes might have made.
Saturday night, Michigan State Police say, a car that troopers had tried to pull over led them on a chase and then collided with Oskam’s vehicle at the intersection of 52nd Street and Broadmoor Avenue in Kentwood. Oskam was killed, as was the 16-year-old passenger in the suspect vehicle – the driver’s cousin, family said.
Oskam’s boyfriend, Chad Beisel, told WISH TV’s sister station WOOD she was driving back from a euchre tournament at her church in Cutlerville at the time of the crash. He was following a few minutes behind her. He had spoken to Oskam on the phone only a few minutes before he came upon the fiery crash.
Then he got a call from his girlfriend’s roommate saying she had been on the phone with Oskam when she heard the sounds of the crash.
“I just thought it was an accident. So I whipped around, I spun back there, but then I saw her car,” Beisel said.
The front half of it was mangled.
“Then they told me that she was still over there and I just wanted to run there. I didn’t care what she looked like. I just wanted to hold her hand,” Beisel said.
Oskam and Beisel, both Calvin College students, would have celebrated their one-and-a-half-year anniversary on Sunday.
“I remember walking down my dorm she was down the path. I’m like, ‘Who is that? I’ve got to meet her,’” Beisel recalled. “I was really open with her. I just told her that like, ‘I like you so much, I like you a lot.’ Even though I knew right then I loved her.”
The two were planning a life together. Beisel said that he wishes he could tell her “just that I love her.”
“I want her back more than anything,” he continued, weeping. “If she’s in heaven right now, I want to be with her there. I want to be with her there. She was my whole life.”
Beisel says Oskam was a devout Christian and she always did the right thing.