After a fatal car crash that killed a grandmother in Charlotte, a glimmer of hope

On the Tuesday night it was torn apart, the Santos family was on its way to Walmart.

It was April 4. Belki Santos was driving south on Park Road at 9:30 p.m, with her 3-year-old son Steven was in the backseat.

“We were going to Walmart,” Belki Santos would say later, “to buy milk for my son.”

Rosalina Santos, Belki’s mother and Steven’s grandmother, sat in the passenger seat of their Honda Pilot as her daughter drove. Rosalina had gone to a Bible study earlier in the evening and still had one of her favorite series of verses pulled up on her phone. It was Matthew 5:14-16, which in the New International Version translation begins: “You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden.”

Traveling north at the same time on Park Road were Greyson Little and Brody Taylor, best friends and teammates on the South Mecklenburg baseball team in Charlotte. They had just finished playing a game and had followed that up by meeting a few teammates for a meal at a nearby Cook Out. Now they were headed home, with Little driving his Ford F-150 truck.

Suddenly, in Little’s rearview mirror, a pair of headlights loomed. Another car was threatening to overtake the truck at a speed later estimated to be 100 mph, on a six-lane road at that junction, where the speed limit is 35.

“I was just like, ‘Brody, they’re going fast,’ Little said. “I mean, really fast.”

The speed seemed so out of the ordinary that Little slowed down, pulled over toward the shoulder of the far right lane and watched the Jeep Wrangler fly by on the left.

“And then the Jeep jumped the median,” Taylor said. “And I knew at that point we were going to have to stop and do something, because this wasn’t going to end well.”

The Jeep Wrangler was driven by a 36-year-old woman named Teresa Marie Miller, and she was the only person in that car. She crossed the median while still going north, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department would later determine, and drove directly into two lanes of Park Road traffic coming south.

The first car narrowly avoided a head-on collision with Miller’s Wrangler.

The next one was driven by Belki Santos, who also tried to avoid the out-of-control Jeep. She swerved but didn’t have enough room or time. The Jeep sped straight toward the car’s front passenger side, where Rosalina Santos was sitting.

The impact was horrible.

“A sound you’ll never forget,” Little said later.

Miller’s Jeep caromed off Santos’ Honda and slammed into a willow oak tree beside South Mecklenburg High. The oak stood its ground while pieces of the Jeep flew everywhere.

Little and Taylor stopped their vehicle, as did several other Good Samaritans who witnessed the crash. Little called 911 as they raced toward the Honda Pilot.

The dispatcher asked Little what emergency services he needed.

“Send everybody!” he said.

‘Her heart was beautiful’

A couple of other people got to the Jeep that had caused the crash. So Little and Taylor ran to the Honda. It was still on all four wheels but had been crushed on the passenger side.

Another person who had stopped to help crawled onto the Pilot’s roof to try and help 3-year-old Steven out of the car through the top. Taylor assisted, too, and ended up with the child being handed to him. He held Steven in his arms as they heard the sirens of emergency vehicles approaching.

“I just tried to get the blood off of the little boy and to get him away from the car,” Taylor said, “because no one should ever have to see that.”

Belki Santos was badly banged up, as was her son. In an interview we conducted by text message, she explained that both she and Steven had been briefly knocked unconscious by the impact. But her attempted evasive maneuvers had succeeded in minimizing the impact of the crash on her child.

“I managed to save Steven,” she wrote. ”But when I spoke to my mom, she didn’t answer me.”

Rosalina Santos, a 49-year-old mother of six who was originally from Honduras and worked as a housekeeper in Charlotte, died due to her injuries from the crash. Teresa Miller, the driver of the speeding Jeep, also died.

Belki Santos and her son Steven were also taken to the hospital by ambulance that night. They were released after several days and are expected to make full recoveries.

Rosalina Santos’ funeral was held April 8 at her home church, Iglesia El Siloe in Rock Hill. After the funeral service, conducted entirely in Spanish, the family comforted each other for hours. Rosalina had been a foundation of the family.

“Rosalina was very pretty, but her heart was even more beautiful,” Rosalina’s sister, Maria Santos, said through an interpreter.

It took a long time that night for the family to try to come to grips with her death, even though they all firmly believed she had gone on to heaven. The part about going to Walmart to buy milk for the child — it kept coming up as the family talked. It was the sort of errand most of us do every day. Utterly forgettable, unless something goes wrong.

Yet Rosalina Santos had been hugging family members repeatedly in the past few days before she died. She had made amends with some, and told others she loved them even more than normal, several family members said. She had spent more time at church and in Bible study than usual. Had she known something might happen, they wondered?

“Her funeral was basically Saturday at 5 p.m. to Sunday at 8 a.m.,” said Keily Santos, one of Rosalina Santos’ nieces who attended the service and the visitation. “Her sons and daughters wanted to have time with her, to say goodbye.”

‘They were good Samaritans’

CMPD Detective Justin Kupfer got to the crash site on Park Road about 45 minutes after the wreck. He was assigned as the lead investigator for the crash. From the first moments following the crash, Kupfer said, “it was a chaotic, hectic scene.”

Kupfer’s preliminary investigation listed “excessive speed and impairment by the driver of the Jeep” as the suspected contributing factors to the crash. Kupfer noted that an odor of alcohol was coming from the Jeep, but added that a toxicology report hasn’t been completed.

As for Little and Taylor’s rough estimation that the Jeep was traveling around 100 mph?

“That’s a pretty good estimate,” Kupfer said.

Belki Santos, Rosalina’s daughter and the 22-year-old driver of the Honda, was screened at the crash site by a DWI task force, which Kupfer described as standard protocol for major crash investigations (CMPD conducts a few dozen of these every year, Kupfer said). She was found not to be impaired.

Relatives of Santos quickly arrived at the crash scene. Miller, the driver of the Jeep, was from Charlotte, Kupfer said, but her next of kin took longer to locate since they lived outside of Mecklenburg County.

As to why Miller was driving so fast, Kupfer said: “We don’t know why she was driving the way she was. We’re not there yet.”

In regard to the South Mecklenburg baseball players, Kupfer praised their actions that night. Said the detective: “They made sure that help was on the way ... They didn’t just drive off like some people do, or take pictures, or anything like that. These boys actually did what they could. They were good Samaritans, and that’s all we could ask for. They saw a crash, and they went into action.”

The baseball players have had a hard time processing what happened and don’t like the fact they drive by the crash site every day to get to school. They keep having nightmares and have been spending most nights at Little’s house together.

“I don’t like closing my eyes right now,” said Taylor, a 17-year-old junior. “I don’t even like blinking. The crash keeps popping up.”

“It’s about all I can think about,” said Little, an 18-year-old senior.

Neither boy sought out publicity for what they did; Joe Evans, South Meck’s football coach, first alerted our newspaper to the incident.

“I told the boys they were heroes after I heard what happened,” Evans said. “And they were like, ‘What? No. We just did what anyone should do.’”

While Taylor plays baseball only for the Sabres, Little also played football at South Meck. I asked Evans what position.

“Safety,” the coach said, then paused.

“That’s kind of appropriate, isn’t it?”

A meeting in the median

On April 10, five members of the Santos family returned to the scene of the crash to place flowers in the median close to where Rosalina Santos had died, and to remember her green eyes, her kind nature, her love for family and her delicious chicharrones.

At the same time, by chance, Little and Taylor had just finished up a game at the South Mecklenburg baseball field, just a few hundred yards away.

Someone from South Mecklenburg High noticed the Santos family in the median placing red roses and carnations and told the boys what was going on, in case they wanted to see the family under less chaotic circumstances than the night of the wreck six days before.

Accompanied by their parents, Taylor and Little came to the crash site, but then stopped about 50 yards away. Small pieces of debris from at least one of the cars still littered the lawn in front of the school. They hesitated.

“We want to go see the family alone,” the boys told their parents.

And so the teenagers crossed the street from the high school to the median, still wearing their red and white South Meck baseball uniforms, and tentatively approached the family.

Several members of the Santos family who were there helping with this small tribute didn’t speak English, and cars were whizzing by on both sides of Park Road. So the conversation was halting.

But the boys told the family members who weren’t aware that they had seen the crash, and that they’d done what they could to help, that they were sorry for the loss of Rosalina Santos.

“Thank you,” some members of the Santos family said.

“Gracias,” said the others, after the boys’ words were translated by Ashley and Keily Santos, two of Rosalina’s nieces.

Then the boys crossed Park Road and walked back toward their high school. They were blinking back tears.

Members of the Santos family were wiping away tears as well.

Several of them hugged each other one more time. And then they all walked slowly back to their car, and drove home.