'A beautiful tragedy': How good rose from deaths of 2 Louisville volleyball moms, girls

Something was wrong.

It had been about five hours since Justin Prather’s wife, Lesley, and their 12-year-old daughter Rhyan left their Louisville home in the family minivan on Valentine’s Day. They had been communicating regularly, but that stopped.

No calls. No texts. Nothing.

Justin looked at the phone app the family used to track each other. He could see the icon representing their Honda Odyssey stationary on Interstate 64 outside St. Louis.

Meanwhile, Anna Pray and Stacey Neal were wondering what was going on with Carrie McCaw. Their friend wasn’t responding to texts.

“That wasn’t like her,” Pray said. “Not at all.”

The answer lay in the stationary icon on Justin Prather’s phone. The icon marked the spot where Lesley and Rhyan Prather and Carrie McCaw and her 12-year-old daughter, Kacey, were killed in a horrific crash on their way to a volleyball tournament in Kansas City, Missouri.

At the actual site, the spot is now marked by two white crosses about 2 feet tall. Each bears two sets of initials – “KM CM” on the cross on the left, “RP LP” on the one on the right.

But while the memorial marks the spot where four lives were ended, it also marks the start of what Neal now calls a “beautiful tragedy.”

Lesley Prather: ‘One of My Best Friends’

The week before the trip that was meant to end at the volleyball tournament, Lesley Prather celebrated her 40th birthday with her family. The gathering was large and boisterous.

“It was very much a Lesley party,” said Terry Hall, her brother-in-law and Rhyan’s uncle. “Drinks were flowing, and it just kind of turned into a dance party in the basement. We never imagined it would be the last time we’d celebrate with her.”

The day after the party started slowly for Lesley and Justin. There was coffee. Headaches. And there was Rhyan, the jovial and sarcastic tween. As she made her way through the house, she saw her parents and joked, “What’s up, drunk-os?” before proceeding to her bedroom.

Rhyan had been the babysitter for the kids at the party. She was a natural at caring for children, Hall said.

“If Rhyan had your kids, you knew they were taken care of well,” he said. “She was always like the mama bear in the room. You couldn’t walk into a room with your baby without knowing Rhyan was going to take her from your arms and go care for her.”

Hall was in the waiting room the day Rhyan was born, an unofficial part of a large family. He would go on to marry Prather’s youngest sister, Stacey, whom he began dating in high school. Whenever their teen relationship hit the inevitable bumps in the road, Lesley Prather was the person Hall would call.

“She wasn’t afraid to call me out if I was being a knucklehead,” he said. “But she’d also say, ‘She’s my sister. I’ve lived with her. I know how to handle this.’ She was genuinely one of my best friends.”

Prather graduated from Pleasure Ridge Park High School, where she lettered in volleyball, basketball and track. After high school, she played volleyball at the University of Louisville, where she met her husband, Justin, a soccer player for the university. She graduated from Louisville in 2002 with a degree in business marketing and earned her master’s in sports administration from the school in 2005. She and Justin Prather married in 2003 and had four kids. Justin declined to comment for this story, referring questions to Hall, the family’s spokesman.

In 2009, she became the head volleyball coach of Indiana University Southeast, in part to be with her youngest sister, who was on the team. During her four years at the helm, she led the Grenadiers to four Kentucky Intercollegiate Athletic Conference semifinal appearances.

She then joined the Louisville Fire Department in 2016. Before getting behind the wheel of the minivan the morning of the crash, she made sure she had her study materials for the sergeant's exam she was going to take.

“Lesley always wanted to give back to her community and help wherever she could,” Hall said. “The firefighters who responded to the crash found her study material and knew from it that she was a firefighter.”

Carrie McCaw: 'The glue that held everyone together'

The week before the trip to Kansas City, Carrie McCaw and her friend Anna Pray met for what would turn out to be the last time.

“It was kind of an after-the-holidays debrief,” Pray said. “It was just a time to take a deep breath and relax. We talked about getting ready for her birthday.”

Stacey Neal encountered the now 44-year-old McCaw on that birthday, Feb. 13. Neal was dropping her child at school for practice when McCaw came running across the parking lot.

“She’d had to run up to the school because someone forgot their key and got locked out of the gym and she had a key,” Neal said. “I told her to hop in and I’d give her a ride home. We took the long way and talked. I’m glad that person forgot their key.”

McCaw was a two-sport athlete at Assumption High School in Louisville, starring in volleyball and basketball before graduating in 1994. She then played on the Syracuse volleyball team.

“She was tall but thin and was often underestimated,” Neal said. “She wanted to go to college far away from here, sort of to re-create herself. She felt like she’d been in the shadows of other folks around here and wanted to go in a totally different direction.”

McCaw was a star at Syracuse and served as team captain her senior year.

After graduating with a degree in managerial law and public policy, with a minor in political science, she spent a year as an assistant volleyball coach at Rutgers University before starting her career as a paralegal with Ice Miller LLP, where she would work for 20 years.

But her career was just a small part of her life.

She began dating her eventual husband, David McCaw, in 1997. They married the following August and had four children.

And “she was everywhere,” Neal said. “Gym manager. Volleyball coordinator. Room mom. Even if you didn’t know her, you knew her. She was so charismatic and had this way of bringing people together. She was like the glue that held everyone together.”

That glue stuck with Neal and Pray as the three registered their children for kindergarten. The trio, who were acquaintances years before while students at Assumption High School, now became the best of friends.

Combined, they had nine children, all of whom became important parts in each others’ lives. Kacey and her twin sister, Jessie, were frequent guests at Neal’s home.

“She had this deep voice that sounded like she smoked a pack of cigarettes a day,” Neal said of Kacey. “She had big thoughts, big dreams about going to medical school and changing the world.”

Pray remembers Kacey as a skipper.

“There are people who skip, and there are people who don’t skip, and Kacey was definitely a skipper,” she said. “... Figuratively, that’s how she went through life.”

Medic: 'Never seen an accident as bad as this'

Elijah Henderson, 29, was on company business that Valentine’s Day morning, driving eastbound on I-64 in a 2009 Ford F-250 pulling a trailer carrying a large air compressor, according to a Missouri State Highway Patrol incident report.

Witnesses said that as they followed Henderson’s vehicle, they noticed the trailer start to fishtail before the truck veered off the left side of the roadway and jumped the median. Another driver said he had set his cruise control at 67 mph and passed the truck and that it “was not going fast and was driving straight.” He said that after he passed the truck, he saw in his rearview mirror that it veered “hard into the center median cables and then flipped over into the other vehicles.”

One of those was the 2014 Honda Odyssey driven by Lesley Prather. Carrie McCaw was beside her. Behind Prather was Kacey. To Kacey’s right was Rhyan.

Henderson told police that he had reached over to roll up the passenger window on the F-250, according to the highway patrol report. Temperatures in the area that day reached a high of 27 degrees around noon, climbing from a low of 9 that morning. The report said Henderson “failed to keep a proper lookout and failed to maintain a single lane.”

Jacquie Hammack and her 15-year-old daughter Allie were headed to the local YMCA when the crash unfolded ahead of them. When she stopped her car, Hammack – a medic with 13 years of experience – saw the pickup on its side and Prather’s minivan smashed beyond recognition.

“In all the years – and I’ve been on the scene of a ton of bad car accidents – I’ve never seen an accident as bad as this,” she said.

As her daughter relayed information to 911 dispatchers, Hammack went to the pickup, where Henderson told her his leg was broken. She went to the minivan.

“I could tell immediately that everybody besides Kacey was deceased,” Hammack said. “There was a gentleman beside me, and I screamed at him to help me get her out. I just had this feeling that she was going to stop breathing at any second.”

She did. The 12-year-old’s faint pulse disappeared.

Allie Hammack looked on as her mom performed CPR and brought Kacey back. By then, rescue personnel were arriving.

Henderson was taken by ambulance to a hospital. The two moms, Prather and McCaw, were pronounced dead at the scene. Rhyan, like Kacey, showed signs of life when paramedics were finally able to extract her from the wreckage. The girls were taken to St. Joseph Hospital West in Lake St. Louis, where they died.

Henderson was charged with four counts of first-degree involuntary manslaughter. On March 7, 2022, he pleaded guilty to all four charges and was sentenced to 10 years in prison. He is currently serving his sentence at the Tipton Correctional Center in Tipton, Mo. Letters seeking comment from Henderson went without reply.

Prathers and McCaws come home

Today the Prathers’ and McCaws’ loved ones live with the thought that the smallest of changes to hundreds of variables might have made a difference.

If the foursome had left five seconds later. If they had made one fewer stop for gas. If they had driven one mile per hour faster or one mile per hour slower.

Hall said he takes solace in the fact that none of the four was ever left alone. The two girls had medical personnel with them from the moment they were removed from the wreckage. Even after they died in the hospital, a rotating group of nurses stayed with their bodies, well after their shifts ended.

Paramedics found Prather’s study material for her firefighter sergeant’s exam. Local firefighters accompanied her body and McCaw’s to the funeral home and stood guard until a colleague from Louisville Fire arrived to take their place. That firefighter, Bobby Cooper, stayed with the bodies and texted mourning family back home.

It was a week before the four bodies were released to make the journey to Louisville. A procession of vehicles proceeded east – partly along the same road Henderson had been traveling that Valentine’s Day morning.

“At every single overpass, there was a first-responder vehicle with a first responder paying respects,” Hall said. “Every single overpass.”

After the crash and the publicity surrounding it, Hall became the Prather family spokesperson. It’s a role he wishes he didn’t have to fill. Lesley Prather wasn’t merely a sister-in-law to him, nor was Rhyan merely a niece.

In many ways, the family had filled a hole in his own heart. Hall came from a fractured home and was raised by his grandmother. His father died when he was 11. Within a year of that, he lost his aunt, great-grandmother and the grandmother who raised him.

“I became kind of like a robot,” he said.

Ironically, that experience prepared him for the role he serves today, Hall said.

“Don’t get me wrong. Lesley and Rhyan’s death rocked me to the core,” he said. “But I’m conditioned for that. I’m not the person who’s going to get on the phone and cry with you. I’m the person who’s going to get on the phone and figure out how to help you. What is it that you need that we can do?”

Scholarships in the McCaws' honor

Nearly four years after the crash that killed her friend and the little girl she considered a bonus daughter, Stacey Neal calls the incident “a beautiful tragedy.” She knows some might struggle to find beauty in the loss of four people. But Neal sees it. Her friend Pray sees it. And now, people in Louisville are having their lives improved because of it.

The two were part of an effort to create a scholarship fund to help send a student from the  Catholic grade school McCaw attended, St. Raphael the Archangel, which is off Bardstown Road, to nearby Assumption. Now that scholarship has expanded to also include a boy each year who can attend any Catholic high school in the area. The two recipients are nominated by their fellow eighth-grade classmates.

“Catholic education was so important to Carrie,” Neal said. “We knew how much it meant to her. She was literally up at that school every single day.”

McCaw’s church held a cornhole tournament to help get the scholarships started. It raised $25,000 in one day.

“That’s not small money for a little Catholic church doing a cornhole tournament,” Neal said.

To date, more than $90,000 has been raised to fund ongoing scholarships in the McCaws’ honor.

'Our purpose': Prather Foundation helps survivors

At the time of the crash, Terry Hall was a member of the board for Shirley’s Way, an organization that provides financial support to people receiving cancer treatment. Hall’s experiences with Shirley’s Way led to an idea to help bring lasting good from the heartache so many people were feeling because of the crash.

“You can only sit in grief for so long,” Hall said. “I wanted to keep their legacies going.”

Prather had dedicated her life to being a firefighter. Her daughter was known for being tender-hearted, playful and never tolerating bullying. In that spirit, the Lesley & Rhyan Prather Foundation was born.

It was approved to begin fundraising on Dec. 4, 2020. That very night, Matt and Lauren Kirchgessner were enjoying a family vacation with their two children, Addie, 6, and Baylor, 4, in Panama City Beach, Florida, at the Coconut Creek Family Fun Park’s mini-golf course. The four had traveled to Florida from Louisville earlier that week.

But as they played, a Chevy Silverado pickup veered off the road, through a fence and into the family fun park, killing the children.

Hall received a call from a Kirchgessner family member. Overnight, the Prather Foundation raised more than $10,000 to charter a plane to take Addie and Baylor’s grandparents to Florida so their parents didn’t have to be alone in dealing with the aftermath of the tragedy.

“It quickly hit us that this is our purpose, that this is what we do for adults,” Hall said.

In the three years since that day, the foundation has raised and distributed more than $600,000 to help more than 350 families, most in the Louisville area and mostly following automobile crashes. As Hall said, providing that kind of support is what the foundation can do for adults.

But Hall said there “was another group of people who were grieving after Lesley and Rhyan died. And that’s the kids.”

So the foundation created kindness cards in honor of Rhyan.

“The goal is to inspire kids to do kind acts and then hand a card to whoever they did it for to say ‘I did this because my friend Rhyan would have done the same thing,’” Hall said. “It’s a way to help encourage kids to lead with kindness.”

In creating the foundation, in donating money to those going through tragedies like what the Prathers and McCaws faced, in encouraging kids to be kind to one another, the deaths of Lesley and Rhyan Prather and Carrie and Kacey McCaw have changed lives.

From the depths of the most unimaginable tragedy, lasting beauty was born.

'I want to be just like Lesley'

But there was another life that took a turn because of the crash.

Prior to what she saw that day, Allie Hammack had always wanted to be a military pilot. But after seeing her mother do her job, after learning Lesley Prather had been a firefighter, a new plan emerged.

Allie started to think about following in Prather’s footsteps.

Allie did a few ride-alongs with her father, also a paramedic, and then sat her parents down to tell them she wanted to become a firefighter. Today, she is enrolled at St. Charles Community College, completing her general education requirements before she begins an EMT program at Lindenwood University in St. Charles, Missouri, this summer.

“This is what I want to do,” Allie said. ‘I want to be just like Lesley.”

The Prather Foundation has been central to her efforts. Allie was awarded a $1,414 scholarship from the foundation toward her training as a paramedic and firefighter, symbolic of Rhyan’s volleyball number, 14.

Through their shared experience, the Hammacks, Prathers and McCaws have become friends.

“They’re all wonderful people,” Jacquie Hammack said. “That day, it was such a horrible day, but I feel like so much good has come out of it. I feel like we have another family.”

And so Allie and Jacquie Hammack decided to do something to help keep alive the memory of those four travelers from Kentucky whose journey ended on that stretch of highway. They and Jacquie’s husband, Kyle, built the crosses that now adorn the side of the road near the scene of the crash.

In January 2021, nearly a year after the accident that killed her friend, Anna Pray drove to Missouri to see the place where she died. She met the firefighters who had been on the scene that day. And then she met the Hammacks. Together, they visited the memorial.

In the months following the accident, Pray struggled to make sense of what had happened and to accept it. She said she felt pulled to visit the scene. So she went and took a mat to kneel on and prayed at the place where her friend’s life ended.

“I didn’t feel them there, and I’m glad about that,” she said. “It gave me a lot of solace, because I feel them in church. I feel them at the high school’s gym. I feel them at the cemetery. But I didn’t feel them there, and I take comfort in that.”

On a mild November day in 2023, the Hammacks were again by the crosses, changing the fall decor that surrounded them to Christmas adornments. They routinely clean up the area, replace the decor and wipe down the crosses.

“I just want the families to know that their loved ones are not forgotten,” Jacquie Hammack said. “I don’t want them ever to think that just because it happened up here that we will ever forget.”

She paused and put her arm around her daughter. “We won’t.”

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: McCaw, Prather deaths on way to volleyball tourney 'a beautiful tragedy'