Harnett crash leaves families, friends mired in grief

COATS -- On a lonely Harnett County road, five lives disappeared in a single violent moment -- canceling a wedding, stealing a young brother and sending two friends back to Mexico in a pair of coffins.

Family and friends have spent days marching through grim ceremony following the Friday-night crash near Coats, when a tanker truck flattened a Honda Accord full of young people.

The relatives and friends sat with the bodies of Norma and Ashley Martinez, 15 and 17, inside a Fuquay-Varina funeral home Tuesday, planning to stay past midnight if they were allowed. Ronnie McKay, Ashley's 18-year-old fiance, still had the wedding ring he planned to present to her the day after the wreck.

Meanwhile, four older brothers kept quiet vigil as the body of German Chavez, the youngest sibling at 25, rested inside the family's mobile home near Angier. They showed off Chavez's horses and Ford pickup in the backyard, along with a picture of the young man in a cowboy hat and boots.

And friends waited to send the bodies of two other victims -- Esteban Isidro and Jorge Gallardo, 22 and 23 -- to their families in Mexico.

"It's so hard to grasp it," said Bonita Evans, 33, a relative of the Martinez sisters. "Before Friday night, everyone was laughing."

The sisters lived next door to Chavez on Denning Road, a corner of Harnett County dotted by soybean and cotton fields.

It's a far-flung area where many families live in single-wide trailers, some with broken skirting, exposed plywood or wobbly wooden stairs. Conversation is as likely to be in Spanish as in English.

Both Martinez girls had left Triton High School in Erwin. Ashley had dropped out, and Norma had been suspended, family members said.

On the night of the crash, the two girls joined Chavez, a landscaper who family members said was dating the younger Martinez.

The three were bound for Twister's, a club in Smithfield, and they had been joined by Isidro and Gallardo, who drove down from Raleigh in the Honda. Family members thought the Raleigh men worked with Chavez, but it was unclear how long they had been in the United States.

As the five made their way to the club, they got a call from McKay, who asked his fiance to come and join him back on Denning Road.

Ashley Martinez was about eight weeks pregnant, family members said, and already had McKay's engagement ring. He had planned on giving her a wedding ring Saturday and seeking her father's approval for marriage this week.

The car, driven by Isidro, turned around to drop Ashley off with McKay.

Unsurvivable

State troopers, who have not determined whether alcohol was involved, said when the vehicle got to the intersection of N.C. 27 and Bailey's Crossroads/Fairground Road, Isidro ran through a stop sign. But friends and family members questioned this, calling Isidro a careful driver and noting that he would have been making a right turn through the intersection, requiring a stop, rather than driving straight through it.

In the intersection, the Honda crossed into the path of the tanker truck. The truck pushed the car across the center line, hitting an Oldsmobile station wagon before coming to rest in a sandy field about 20 feet short of a mobile home with a swing set in the front. The truck's driver, Ronnie Vanatta Jr., and a motorist in a Oldsmobile were injured. No charges will be filed.

Troopers called the Honda unrecognizable and the accident unsurvivable. Bits of the car remained in the field this week.

John Ennis owns the field and has lived in the house he built down N.C. 27 since 1973. He said that at least five people have been killed at the intersection, that visibility is poor there and that flashing lights are needed.

"I saw a sheet over the little Honda, and I knew it was a bad wreck," Ennis said Monday, surveying the scene. "Then I saw that tanker truck so close to that trailer."

Across the street, two members of Chavez's family pounded a cross covered with carnations into the ground.

Later, after a hearse brought his body to the family home, they stood in the front yard and recalled his friendly nature.

"You won't never see him mad," said Jose Cantu, an in-law, before Tuesday's funeral in Newton Grove. "They decided to bury him here. All his family is here."

Saying goodbye

Next door to Chavez's house, the family of the Martinez girls headed out Tuesday for a pair of wakes in Fuquay-Varina.

"They knew a lot of people," said Evans, the stepmother. "They was real sweet girls. They just took life one day at a time."

McKay said he would go fishing with Ashley often, and she would get excited even when she caught a small fish.

This was the couple's second pregnancy together. During the first, she would call him during his training in Maryland for the U.S. Army reserves, reporting each time the baby kicked.

When they lost the baby near the end of Ashley's term, they got pregnant again right away.

This morning, before the burial, he will take a private moment to say goodbye to them both.