She was out with people she knew, in a place she was comfortable, doing nothing that would have struck anyone as unwise given the conditions of the night.

Around midnight, she decided to head home.

She was driving her father’s Ford LTD — a large American sedan of the type that was ubiquitous in the late 1970s.

The roads between Fosston and Lengby in December were what rural Minnesota roads in December always were: covered in packed snow, potentially icy beneath, demanding the kind of defensive driving that locals had learned from childhood.

What happened next was not the result of recklessness or poor judgment.