A 26-year-old Casper woman was filming herself on Snapchat while driving about 105 mph down a lonely stretch of Wyoming Highway 487 when her Ford Contour drifted off the pavement.
Sydney Ruschmann was distracted as the right-side tires left the highway near milepost 66, about 40 miles southwest of Casper, on Oct. 15.
Ruschmann overcorrected to the left, sending the car into a passenger-side skid across the highway and into the opposite ditch.
The Ford struck a delineator post and continued sliding until its tires dug into the earth and tripped the car into a violent rollover, a crash summary from the Wyoming Highway Patrol shows.
Ruschmann died at the scene.
Those few seconds recorded on her cellphone are now part of the official account of how her life ended.
“She just had a huge heart, man,” Adam Doyle told Cowboy State Daily. “She loved animals, and yeah, she just — she loved hard.”
Doyle is Ruschmann’s stepfather, but he helped raise her from the time she was 13 and calls her his daughter.
“I just want her to be known as loving and compassionate,” said Ruschmann’s mother, Melinda Doyle. “She cared so much about other people's feelings.”
A Strange Ding In The Night
Adam and Melinda Doyle were in bed around 10 p.m. on Thursday night when Adam's phone suddenly began making a sound he'd never heard.
“Crash detected. SOS,” the notification said. “Sydney Ruschmann called emergency services from this approximate location after iPhone detected a crash.”
Adam and Melinda were listed as emergency contacts on Ruschmann's iPhone.
Along with the alert came a pin on Apple Maps showing exactly where her phone detected the crash.
Adam immediately called her, but she didn't answer.
He tried again.
Nothing.
He called dispatch, told them his daughter's phone was reporting that she'd been in a crash and gave them the location.
Then he called Ruschmann's 25-year-old brother.
Ruschmann had called her brother earlier that day, but he hadn't heard from her since. He checked Life360, a family location-sharing app.
It showed Ruschmann in the same remote area.
“I got a really bad feeling,” Adam recalled telling him.
“Me too,” his son answered.
Adam woke Melinda.
“I told my wife, ‘We need to get in the car,’” he said.
At that point, Adam was still trying to convince himself that Ruschmann might be OK. Maybe she'd wrecked her car and wasn't answering because she was embarrassed. Maybe she knew she'd have to explain what happened to her dad — but he couldn't shake the feeling that something was terribly wrong.
‘Can You See Her?’
Ruschmann's brother lived on the west side of Casper and was closer to the crash.
He headed toward the location while Adam and Melinda followed in another vehicle.
He could watch his son's location moving toward the same pin where Ruschmann's phone had reported the crash.
As the two dots drew closer together, Adam called him.
“Can you see her? Can you see her?” he asked.
Then he heard his son crying.
“Dad, how far out are you?” Adam remembers him asking. “I don't think it's good. I don't think it's OK.”
Ruschmann's body was on the ground, covered by a tarp.
Adam and Melinda were still racing toward the scene when an officer got on the phone.
“Do not come here, sir,” Adam recalled being told. “Stop right now. Do not come here.”
Adam and Melinda pulled over. Officers sent their son back to meet them.
“It was just tragic and terrible,” Adam said. “All the worst nightmares that a parent has.”
They returned home. Nobody slept.
The family sat together waiting to understand what happened.
At about 3 a.m., Adam said a Wyoming Highway Patrol trooper called.
The trooper told him investigators found the Snapchat video, which showed Ruschmann losing control of the car and the phone flying through the air.
For the Doyle family, it was devastating confirmation.
Before The Crash
Before Ruschmann became a name in a fatal crash report, she was the girl who almost always had her nose buried in a book, Adam said.
She loved fantasy, especially “Harry Potter,” the “Twilight” series and anything involving the supernatural worlds.
Natrona County School District records list Ruschmann as a Kelly Walsh High School senior on its Achievement Honor Roll during the 2018-19 school year, with a grade-point average between 3.0 and 3.49.
“She always did well in school,” Adam said.
Ruschmann came to live with Adam and Melinda shortly before she turned 14, joining a blended family that would eventually include seven children.
One thing Adam remembers clearly is how fiercely Sydney loved the people she considered hers.
“She was like a mama bear almost with her siblings,” he said. “She was always ready to protect and go to war with somebody for them.”
“She could be mad at you all she wanted,” Adam said. “But if anybody else even came at you sideways, she was ready to defend you to the death.”
As an adult, she would find time to come to her mother's house and help without being asked, Adam said. She'd clean the kitchen or tackle the refrigerator.
“She's like the only kid that did that kind of stuff,” he joked. “And we have seven.”
The Santa Clauses
Christmas is a big deal in the Doyle house. Every year when the children were growing up, they would choose their own ornaments.
Melinda collects Santa Claus figurines.
“She was so little that she was able to get up on this shelf and put them all up there, make them so pretty,” Melinda said.
It wasn't just decorating to Sydney, her mother said.
“She really took a lot of pride in that,” Melinda said. “She just wanted to make sure I loved it and I was happy with it.”
That is one of the memories Melinda wants people to have of her daughter.
Not a speedometer reading, not a Snapchat video, but a young woman with a big heart and her whole life ahead of her.
‘It's Not OK’
The Doyles don't minimize what happened on Highway 487.
“Cellphone use while you're driving,” Melinda said, when asked what message she has for other families. “It's not OK."
For Adam, there's another lesson from the hours before Ruschmann died.
She had reached out to members of her family that day. She called her mother, sister, and brother.
Life was busy. Then suddenly, they were out of time.
“I would just say, cherish every moment that you can with the people that you love,” Adam said. “Take time for them, you know, even if it's just to be on a phone call with them.”
He wishes he'd had one more conversation with Ruschmann.
They had the kind of relationship where she could call him and talk when life got difficult, he said.
“I wish that I could have just been able to have that conversation with her,” Adam said, “to tell her to just come home.”
Young Drivers And Distraction
What happened to Ruschmann comes against a broader pattern of distracted driving on Wyoming roads.
Wyoming Department of Transportation crash data show 4,452 crashes involving suspected distracted driving from 2020 through 2024.
Those crashes killed 52 people.
Nearly 57% of the drivers suspected of distraction during that five-year period were 34 or younger, according to WYDOT. Drivers 24 and younger alone accounted for about 36% of suspected distracted drivers.
The agency also cautions that distraction can be difficult to establish after a wreck and is likely underreported.
Adam, a youth pastor, said he’s watched young people increasingly look to social media apps like Snapchat for the validation and acceptance they might struggle to find elsewhere.
“That was more pressing to her than the fact that she was driving down the road at 100 miles per hour," he said. "Obviously, all of our choices have consequences, and this is just a devastating consequence of that need.”
Kolby Fedore can be reached at kolby@cowboystatedaily.com.
