Patrick McCarthy, the village manager in Chatham, Ill., was at his office on Monday afternoon when he heard the wails of so many sirens in his town of 14,000 people that he knew something was terribly wrong.
When he and a co-worker rushed to the scene a few blocks away, they saw what appeared to have been a violent and inexplicable accident: A car had plowed through a field, avoiding trees and pillars, and crashed through an after-school center. Three children and one teenager, ranging in age from 7 to 18, were killed.
“Hopefully that’s what it was, an accident,” Mr. McCarthy said. “Today we’re just kind of going through and trying to figure out what do we do next after something like this happens.”
The Illinois State Police said on Tuesday that the driver of the vehicle was a 44-year-old resident of Chatham. The resident is not in custody, the police said, and the cause of the crash remains under investigation. Calls to the resident’s home went unanswered on Tuesday.
Toxicology reports are pending, the authorities said, adding that the crash did not initially appear to be a “targeted attack.”
In Chatham, a bedroom community about a 20-minute drive from the state capital of Springfield, residents wrestled on Tuesday with grief and horror over the crash. Y.N.O.T. Outdoors, the operator of the after-school program, was well known in town as a popular place for afternoon child care and summer camp, allowing parents with jobs to juggle work and family responsibilities.
On Facebook, Jamie Loftus, the founder and executive director of the center, described what he understood to have happened. Security cameras recorded the vehicle speeding toward the building, he said, “with no apparent attempt to alter its direction.”
The vehicle drove into the east wall of the building, continued through the building and burst out its west wall, across a gravel road. It finally crashed into a ballpark fence.
“I cannot gather the words to express much of anything that will make sense in print,” he said in a statement. “However, I do know that our families who suffered loss and injury today are hurting very, very badly.”
The Sangamon County Coroner identified the victims of the crash as 7-year-old Kathryn Corley of Chatham; 7-year-old Alma Buhnerkempe of Chatham, 8-year-old Ainsley Johnson of Chatham; and 18-year-old Rylee Britton of Springfield.
Galen Johnson, Ainsley’s grandfather, wrote in a Facebook post: “Words alone cannot express the pain we in the Johnson family are feeling with the loss of granddaughter Ainsley Grace Johnson.”
Braelynn Finley, 20, a college student at Bradley University, works at Y.N.O.T. in the summers and said she was an employee at the after-school program several years ago.
She knew all four of the victims. Ainsley was “so funny, she never failed to make any of us laugh,” Ms. Finley said. Kathryn was quiet and sweet. Alma was always wearing University of Illinois T-shirts, the place she wanted to go to college someday.
The three girls loved to sit together, color and make bracelets, she said.
“I can’t even put them into words,” Ms. Finley said. “They were the kindest girls ever.”
The center was a boisterous, chaotic place, where children who were happy to be out of school played games, did their homework and watched movies on rainy days, she said.
On Tuesday, outside the after-school center, tire marks could be seen on the lot where the car drove before striking the building. Flowers were placed in front of the wall that the car drove through, which is now boarded up.
Around town, residents were wearing red — the school district’s color — in support of the victims.
After the crash, several children were taken to hospitals. Children who were unhurt were transported on three buses to the Chatham Baptist Church, a short drive down the road.
Ahron Cooney, the senior pastor, said in an interview that he hurried to the church when he heard that the after-school building had been hit, along with other staff members, deacons and their spouses.
Children and teenagers were ushered into the gym, and parents were allowed into the church sanctuary. Nurses treated minor scrapes and bruises on the children.
One by one, frantic parents were reunited with their children, he said, and pastors counseled the families whose children had been killed.
“It’s tough in those moments, because what can you really say?” he said. “There’s very few words that matter to people in that much pain in that moment.”
At his church, Pastor Cooney said, they call it “a ministry of presence,” offering the grief-stricken comfort in the fact that other people are at their side.
“We live in a broken world,” he said, “and sometimes bad stuff happens that we just have no answers for.”
Susan C. Beachy contributed research. Carly Gist contributed reporting from Chatham, Ill.
