GILROY—When Mary Williams awakens in the middle of the night and cannot get back to sleep, she seeks the comfort of her daughter, Sara. She’s doesn’t head to her bedroom—she hasn’t set foot in there for nearly two months.
Instead, Mary sits in her wheelchair among Sara’s treasured items and family photographs in what she calls the “mission room” on the second floor of their Gilroy home. She reads a poem by Sara called “I am.” She holds a Christopher High School class of 2015 graduation cap belonging to Sara’s twin brother Jonathan, also 18.
“Sara we made it,” the cap reads.
A portrait of the identical twins as toddlers adorns the top. But Sara’s gone. So are three of her friends.
Sara was killed, along with two grade school girlfriends and her boyfriend of several months, when their car went off the road and overturned May 12. All four passengers—including Williams, Yesenia Mendoza Pina, Yolanda Jimenez and Joseph Flemate, 24—were killed on impact, according to police. The three girls, 18, were one month shy of graduating high school.
“You should never have to bury your children. As a parent, you never, ever expect to have to bury your children,” Mary Williams said.
Today, 23-year-old Anthony Imbronone III, the driver, is in county jail on charges of manslaughter and driving under the influence of alcohol. Prosecutors say he was drunk when the Ford Mustang he was driving flipped and landed in an irrigation ditch on Leavesley Road, east of Gilroy and just a few minutes’ drive from the Williams’ home.
Sara’s twin, Jonathan, completed a mission trip to Mexico with St. Mary Catholic Church and returned to Gilroy June 28. His sister was scheduled to go, and they’d gone the past three years—together.
Jonathan and about 66 others from the Gilroy parish built three homes instead of their usual two in a rural town not far from Tijuana. The group dedicated the last one to Sara, who Jonathan calls “half of him,” and installed a portrait of her in the new home.
“You have no idea how much people actually care,” Jonathan said recently as he sat in the Williams family’s mission room. “It was a big thing for me. I do appreciate it. She was a great person.”
Every year, Sara was ecstatic about participating in the mission trip, her mother said.
Though she was dissuaded from interacting with the dogs in Mexico, last year Sara brought buckets and flea shampoo to care for the animals. Most of all, she looked forward to seeing the children.
“Any time the Mexico mission came up, it put a smile on her face,” Mary Williams said. “‘Oh I’m going,’ she’d always say. It was her thing. She loved it and intended to go every year, forever.”
With Sara gone, the Williams family plans on sponsoring other volunteers in their daughter’s place. They’ve established a scholarship foundation to help other teens who may not have the $550 needed to participate in the St. Mary mission trip to Mexico.
They helped a Gilroy girl go this year, in part due to donations via an online fundraiser and support from St. Mary Catholic Church, and hope to sponsor more volunteers in the future.
Community response ‘awe inspiring’
Mary Williams and Sara’s father Joe Williams estimate 100 people came through their Gilroy home the day after the accident—including district bus drivers, friends and church acquaintances, students and teachers at Christopher High, and neighbors.
A vigil for Sara Williams held at Christopher High on May 18 drew hundreds.
Her mother remembers one of Sara’s classmates remarking, “no matter where we were or what was going on, (Sara) always left me feeling better.”
“She had that effect on people,” Joe Williams said.
“(The response) tells us she touched so many more lives than we were aware of,” Mary Williams added. “We had no idea that our little Sara had such an impact on the entire community. We miss her so much, but we’re so proud of her.”
Since the accident, the parents of some of the other teens whose lives were also cut short have helped the Williams family cope. They are getting through it together.
On their way home
The Williams family’s home phone rang around 10:10 p.m. on May 12.
Sara was on her way home, a few minutes past her curfew on school nights, when her boyfriend of a few months, Flemate, called her parents to apologize for being late.
Flemate, a 24-year-old “gentle giant,” apologized profusely and said they were getting gas and that they’d be home soon. They never made it past the curve on Leavesley Road where the two-lane highway approaches New Avenue.
The three girls in the Mustang, Jimenez, Mendoza Pina and Sara Williams, were grade school friends who started elementary school together in the dual language immersion program. They separated after they went to different middle schools and later different high schools.
“It wasn’t until just shortly before they died that they started spending time together,” Mary Williams said.
Sara, who avidly journaled but kept her writings to herself most of the time, had a bucket list of 130 things she wanted to do before she died. She started working on it a few years ago, according to her mother.
“One of the things was to stand on the street corner in the middle of town and give everybody a hug,” Mary Williams said, smiling as she recalled the list. “Some were realistic, like becoming a cosmetologist, and some were kind of silly—like dying her hair green.”
She was the kind of person who, if she had any money in her pocket, would have given it away to someone in need. While that annoyed her parents, they look back on it as a reflection of her personality.
“She’d always be there for you no matter what,” her twin brother Jonathan Williams said. “If the world didn’t accept her, she found a way to feel accepted. Even if she told everyone she didn’t. She accepted herself in the end.”
An unbreakable bond
Sara and Jonathan came into the Williams family after they were adopted as two premature babies, both weighing 3.5 pounds. From the beginning, the twins did virtually everything together.
“They’d finish each other’s sentences and look at each other and know what the other one wanted,” Mary Williams said, adding that they even made up their own language.
They shared the same room until they started elementary school, but even having separate bedrooms couldn’t keep them apart.
“That didn’t do us any good because in the morning they’d be in the same room. Sara would climb out of her crib, on top of the dresser and into Jonathan’s crib,” their mother said. “If he couldn’t get out of his crib, she’d go to him.”
Wounds still healing
While the community’s response to the tragedy has helped the family of the victims grapple with the deaths, Mary Williams admits her family is struggling.
“We’re having a really hard time letting go, even though I know in my heart she’s safe in God’s hands. He’s going to keep her safe in his hands forever.
“I know we’ll be together someday,” she said. “But because she was a child, it’s going to be a while. That’s hard. It’s really hard.”
