Welcome to So Dead, a podcast where sometimes shit gets heavy.

I'm Jen Carpenter.

And I'm Danie Fairman.

Happy True Crime Tuesday.

And happy Taco Tuesday, Girls and Boys.

There is nothing funny about today's episode of So Dead,

but it is an interesting, horrifying,

shocking piece of Michigan history that we felt compelled to talk about.

Today we'll be talking about the 2006 Taylor University tragedy.

Taylor University is a Christian liberal arts college in upland, Indiana.

It is a private institution set on about 250 acres of rural countryside, with a student

body of roughly 2000.

So it's a pretty small school, which makes the events that took place that much more awful

because everybody knew everybody.

April 26, 2006 was a sunny spring day in Indiana.

There were just a few weeks left in the semester, and students were preparing for finals

and graduation.

There was a banquet honoring Taylor's new president at the school's Fort Wayne campus that day,

which was about an hour's drive from the main campus in Upland, and a group of food service employees and

student workers traveled to Fort Wayne to cater the event.

Around 8 p.m., two of the school's passenger vans full of staff and students were headed back to Upland following the banquet when tragedy struck.

On Interstate 69, at Mile Marker 66, a semi-driver by the name of Robert Spencer fell asleep behind the wheel of his rig,

...