A bride-to-be who was due to join her fiancé at the altar on Sunday to celebrate their love has swapped her white dress for a funeral outfit after her beau was reportedly killed by a wrong-way driver on the motorway the day before their wedding.
“I should be in my wedding dress right now — not grieving,” Shauntea Weaver, 40, sobbed Sunday in an interview with the New York Post. Our ceremony was supposed to be at 5pm today, in a few hours. It’s devastating, and not just for me. He has three children who loved him very much.”
Early Saturday morning, her fiancé Kirk Walker, 38, was celebrating his bachelor party when his vehicle was reportedly hit head-on around 2:20 a.m. by a pickup truck driving the wrong way on a highway in Harlem, New York.
The groom-to-be, who was at the wheel at the time, and his cousin Rob McLaurin, 40, a passenger in the vehicle, are believed to have lost their lives in the collision, which caused the front of his orange and black Challenger to explode, according to images from the American media.
The driver of the pickup truck allegedly fled, leaving behind a passenger with broken legs, the victim’s fiancée said.
“The detectives told me they were going to do everything they could to get justice. They told me the driver left his DNA on the airbags. So they have that. Plus, the passenger is in the hospital with broken legs and he’s going to have to talk,” she told the New York Post.
While the grand ceremony planned at the Royal Manor in New Jersey was canceled, the couple’s loved ones gathered Sunday to show their support, releasing white balloons into the sky during a vigil in honor of the groom, ABC7 reported.
At the same time, testimonies from the family have flooded onto social networks to pay tribute to the two cousins.
“How does our family go from planning one celebration to planning two funerals? His fiancée, I can’t imagine her pain right now. Both cousins had children, parents and siblings!” the men’s cousin, Akilan Ke-Ki Woods, wrote in a letter.
