18-year-old crash victim was a 'free spirit'
Elise Delozier was a free spirit.
She may have been only 18, just short of a year removed from graduating from Susquehannock High School, but she was something.
She spoke her mind, her family said.
"Sometimes, you never knew what was going to come flying out of her mouth," said her aunt, Lacey Lentz. "She was uninhibited."
Her father, Joe Delozier, has a favorite photo he keeps on his iPhone. In it, Elise is barefoot, wearing shorts and a long-sleeved T-shirt. She's holding a flower.
"That was my little girl," he said Saturday, the day after his daughter died in a car crash on Seven Valleys Road, just outside Glen Rock. The site wasn't far from her family's home in Seven Valleys.
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Elise, they believe, was either on her way home, or on her way the bank, when the driver of the car she was riding in lost control, ran up an embankment and struck a tree. The driver was taken to York Hospital for treatment of what were described by police as non-life-threatening injuries.
"She was a wonderful girl," her father said. "She loved life."
She worked two jobs, one at Felton company and another doing cleaning. She was looking forward to buy a new car and getting her own place, her father said. She was probably going to go car shopping this weekend, he said.
She was an independent young woman, her family said. And an outdoors woman. She loved hunting, fishing, trapping, all of it.
"I started her at an early age," her father said. "It was a part of her life."
She trapped two beavers at her great-uncle's place in Clearfield County last year. This year, she got a bobcat. Her uncle called her "Bobcat."
She was not exactly a tomboy.
"She could hit like a man, but be gentle like a woman," said her uncle, Steve Forry.
Her father said she was the family's "delicate flower."
She was adventurous. She enjoyed heading down to the Susquehanna, below Long Level, and jumping into the river from the cliff. She took her cousin there when he was visiting from out of town. It isn't an act for the faint of heart.
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Her favorite expression was "Whatever. I do what I want to do."
"She lived free," her father said.
Her aunt said when she was a toddler, they had to make the doors were kept locked or she would head outside wearing just her diaper. She just loved being outdoors, had all her life.
She and her dad had a close relationship, forged from their shared love of the outdoors.
On his birthday, she wrote him a note: "Happy Birthday to an amazing man!
"I am a product of my environment," she wrote. "You have shown me so many great things that make me who I am, and even, sometimes fortunately, my temper. I can never thank you enough for being the best dad at the end of the day."
He taught her well. She was a crack shot, her family said.
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On Saturday, her father, uncles and other members of the family gathered at the family's home on Rohrbaugh Road to sight-in and pattern shotguns, in preparation for turkey season. The get-together had been planned before Elise's death.
"She'd be shooting right now," her father said.
Had she lived, Bobcat would be getting ready to bag a turkey.