TEPETITAN, El Salvador (AP) — Parents, siblings, aunts, nephews and other relatives of a Salvadoran family of eight who died in the fiery crash of a semitrailer and a van in Georgia this week struggled to wrap their minds around the tragedy on Wednesday as they hoped that the bodies of their lost loved ones would soon be repatriated to the Central American nation.
The family died on the way to shop at a local mall on Monday afternoon when a tractor-trailer collided with their van, according to law enforcement. Their van burst into flames and killed 42-year-old Maribel Ramírez, and her five children, Justin, Andy, Natali, Evan and Kenia, who was three months pregnant. The crash also claimed the lives of Kenia's husband Darwin and her 3-year-old son.
Most in the van were children.
Georgia State Patrol arrested the driver of the tractor-trailer, 33-year-old Kane Aaron Hammock, and he was charged with eight counts of second-degree vehicular homicide and one count of second-degree feticide by vehicle, Franka Young, a spokesperson for the Georgia Department of Public Safety, said in an email Tuesday afternoon. Hammock has also been charged with counts of following too closely, no registration and failure to exercise due care.
Meanwhile, relatives back home in the small Salvadoran town of Tepetitan was left reeling from the loss of a family who built a life in the United States after Maribel migrated nearly two decades ago.
“It’s something painful that we’re living through," said Carmen Gavidia Ramírez, Maribel's sister. “I couldn’t believe it when they called us Monday night to tell us they had died. I still can’t believe it — it can’t be true, but it is.”
Gavidia, whose eyes were still red from tears, said she learned of the crash when she got a call from one of her brothers who also lives in Georgia. She could feel a pit in her stomach, like she knew something bad had happened, she said.
Maribel was the oldest of her siblings, and the first to migrate to the U.S. from their 4,000-person town, which sits nestled next to a volcano and sugar cane fields stretching along the San Vicente department in the center of El Salvador. Gradually, she brought her four brothers and her daughter Kenia, who was 24 years old at the time of the crash.
“My sister Maribel left the way many Salvadorans do. She worked here as a day laborer, and one day she said, ‘I want to go,’ and she took off,” Gavidia remembered.
She clutched a graduation photo of Kenia as a proudly posing child, which still hangs in a wooden frame on the blue wall of their humble home. Their 60-year-old mother lay resting in a hammock nearby shrouded by grief, unable to speak about the death of her daughter.
Gavidia said that since the news broke, the family has received visits from friends in town and even funeral homes have come offering their services.
“But I don't know what's going to happen,” she added. They didn't know when or how they would recover the bodies.
She said El Salvador's Foreign Ministry contacted them to express solidarity and offer help in the often arduous and costly process of repatriating the bodies, and that her brother Rafael in the U.S. has been speaking with the government to handle paperwork.
“Though we don’t know if it will cover all or only part of the costs," she said. "We don’t know if they’ll be able to bring them back because it costs around $100,000 — that’s what we’ve been told.”
A GoFundMe page started by a family friend to help with the cost of transporting and burying the eight family members had already collected over $16,000 as of Wednesday night.
“We are devastated,” read a post on the page, dotted with photos of the family gathered smiling around a Christmas tree. ___
AP journalist Kate Brumback in Atlanta contributed to this report.