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Ejypt - Daily News (After the Accident)


'Singers recovering from injuries Were in SUV with Lisa Lopes when it crashed'

By AL HUNTER JR. huntera@phillynews.com Daily News wire services contributed to this report POSTED: April 29, 2002

Today was supposed to be the day.

Egypt, a singing group comprising four friends from Germantown, was supposed return to the United States today, refreshed from a Honduran vacation, ready to take another step to possible stardom.

They were to start promoting their demo record, which Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes had helped them with, according to a parent of one of the girls.

Instead, three of the four are returning with injuries suffered when Lopes, the high-profile member of the Grammy-award winning trio TLC, lost control of an SUV she was driving near Jutiapa last Thursday and ran off a narrow road. The vehicle toppled into a shallow ditch and flipped several times. Lopes, 30, a native of Logan who had made Atlanta her home, died in the crash.

Inside the rented Mitsubishi Montero were nine passengers, including Katrina Gibson, 22, her sister Sophia Gibson, 19, Joy Lonon, 20, and T'Melle Rawlings, 19. The girlfriends had caught Lopes attention in California after winning a contest sponsored by Coca-Cola, said Yvonne Rawlings, T'Melle's mother.

Lopes "treated them like queens," Yvonne Rawlings said. "She saw a lot of promise," in the Philadelphia girls.

But last night, Rawlings was worried about her daughter. T'Melle was in the seat behind Lopes. She suffered serious leg and hip injuries, her mother said, requiring emergency surgery, and forcing T'Melle to stay in Honduras.

T'Melle is "in a lot of pain," said her mother, who since the crash has spoken frequently with her daughter over the phone. She's in a hospital in La Ceiba, where English isn't spoken much and where medical care might not be as advanced as that available in the United States, her mother said.

Dewayne Rawlings, T'Melle's dad, took a plane yesterday morning to Honduras to be with his daughter.

The three other group members sustained cuts and bruises, but their injuries apparently weren't serious enough to require they stay in Central America.

Joyce Taylor, mother of Lonon, said her daughter complained of a leg injury, but was "basically holding everybody else together." The girls had gone to Honduras with Lopes "to get away from the riff-raff and get their music career together," she said.

Patricia Gibson said her daughters sustained bruises. "Spiritual wise, they're holding up pretty well," she said in between dashing back and forth from the front door of her Germantown home to answer the telephone.

Tied around a porch post at the Gibson home were "Welcome Back" balloons anticipating the arrival of her daughters.

The four girls, who parents say were raised in Christian households, were known as the Angels (pronounced An-Jels).

Katrina Gibson and Joy Lonon graduated from Germantown High; Sophia Gibson from Martin Luther King; and T'Melle Rawlings, of Chestnut Hill, graduated from the Imhotep Institute Charter School.

They had just finished recording a demo in Atlanta.

Meanwhile, an autopsy performed in San Pedro Sula, shows Lopes apparently died of internal injuries, the most prominent being a fracture at the base of her skull and brain trauma.

The crash occurred Thursday as the entourage was going to visit a community where Egypt was scheduled to perform.

"We all got dressed up looking nice and lovely," Joy Lonon told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "We kept talking about what games we were going to play with the kids when we got there and how much fun we were having."

Passengers said the SUV quickly came up behind a pickup truck that was either moving slowly or stopped. Lopes tried go around the truck, but an oncoming vehicle was in the lane, and she had to turn hard to the left, going out of control and down the ditch.

Seconds after the crash, "I looked and I had blood all over me. I kept hearing everybody call for Lisa," Lonon said. "I was screaming her name. I was out of it."

It may have appeared to be a strange match, four girls out of the church working with a woman with a reputation for being volatile and who had a police record for setting fire to her ex-boyfriend's mansion. And though one parent declined to speak on that, another said Lopes was "nothing like" what had been written about her.

"She really was concerned and very honest," said Yvonne Rawlings. "She was like one of the girls. She was a sincere person, helping them out to get an opportunity" for success.

Rozonda "Chilli" Thomas, of Lopes own group, said TLC would finish its fourth album but would not try to replace its lost member.

"I know that Lisa would not want us to stop," said Thomas Saturday. "So TLC is not over."

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