The grief overwhelms Marc Albertsen when he sees pictures or knick-knacks in his Grimes, Iowa, home that remind him of his daughter.

The Pioneer Hi-Bred scientist received a telephone call from Hawai'i authorities Thursday afternoon. They told him his youngest daughter, Amelia Albertsen, 22, had died in a car crash.

"I just think about how she's gone now, and I'll never get to see what she became," he said yesterday. "She was 22 and already a woman, but I thought, the next 10 years were going to be very interesting to see how her life turned out."

She and two friends were killed when their car slammed into a concrete barrier early Thursday on Likelike Highway.

Police said a 2001 Audi driven by James Krzywonski was traveling toward Kane'ohe at 100 mph when the car slammed into a concrete barrier at the entrance to the tunnel.

Krzywonski, 30, had a blood-alcohol reading of .225, nearly three times the legal limit of .08, the office of the Honolulu medical examiner said. Albertson had a reading of .214.

"I don't even understand that," Marc Albertsen said of the drunken-driving finding.

Amelia Albertsen was a psychology graduate student at Argosy University in Honolulu. She was working toward her doctorate and hoped to work with children, her father said.

"When I look at her face, I see this eagerness to experience the world," her father said. "She wanted to see and do everything she could."

Amelia Albertson graduated from Ankeny (Iowa) High School and earned her undergraduate degree from Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Va. She studied in London before beginning graduate school in Honolulu.

"I always tried to instill in my daughters that they are a small speck in a very big world," Marc Albertsen said.

Albertsen and his wife, Marjorie, visited Amelia last week.

"We stopped back one more time on our way back to Iowa just so I could see her again," Albertson said. "We had a fun, goofy time at the restaurant. "

The next time Albertsen saw his daughter was Thursday afternoon when he went to the Johnston police station to identify her remains by photos of tattoos sent from Hawai'i.

"All I could think of," Albertsen said, "was she was gone. Her life will go unfinished."

Amelia Albertsen is survived by her mother, NancyJane Albertsen Acosta of Ankeny; her father and stepmother, Marjorie Albertsen, of Grimes; and a sister, Joanne Albertsen of New York City.