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Ten years later, unsolved fatal crash still hurts family

 
Jacquelyn Palfy’s mother, Kim, treasures photos of her daughter and other memorabilia that she keeps in a chest in her bedroom.
Jacquelyn Palfy’s mother, Kim, treasures photos of her daughter and other memorabilia that she keeps in a chest in her bedroom.
Published Dec. 21, 2014

LARGO — Every Christmas Eve, Kim Palfy reads her only daughter's favorite book, The Polar Express, and eats the sugar cookies she loved to bake.

She takes out Jacquelyn Palfy's presents, but her daughter has never opened her gifts. They were wrapped 10 years ago, just days before she died at age 20 on Dec. 19, 2004, during a road rage crash on Missouri Avenue.

The driver sped away and police never found him, but Jacquelyn's mother finds comfort in remembering her daughter's life: the little girl who took her rag doll to slumber parties, the teenager who played on a boys soccer team, the young woman who longed to be a wife and a mom.

"Finding that person," Palfy said, "is not up to me."

• • •

In a wooden chest across from her bed, Palfy stores many of her daughter's possessions: photographs, school poems, and baby clothes. In her freezer, she keeps the peppermint bark cookies Jacquelyn baked the night before she died.

They keep the memories alive. As a toddler, Jacquelyn got out of her car seat and clambered next to her mom as Palfy, whose husband died this year, drove across the Howard Frankland Bridge. A ninth-grade teacher raised the group's grade when Jacquelyn advocated for their presentation on the Holocaust. When the family dog ripped her rag doll, Susie, into pieces, she had the doll remade years later.

After graduating from Largo High, Jacquelyn enrolled in classes at St. Petersburg College and got a job at a Sports Authority. She bought a house with her longtime boyfriend and often had friends over.

"We were all connected through her," said Kathryn Persechino Steele, a close friend. "As a group, we weren't necessarily close; but she was the glue, the connection."

On Dec. 18, 2004, Kathryn slept over while visiting Jacquelyn and her roommate, Brandon Steele, whom Kathryn later married. Another friend, Brian Gorrow, also stayed over that night. The next morning before 10 a.m., Kathryn recalls, Jacquelyn jumped on her bed and told her to wake up.

She wanted to get breakfast at the Country Harvest Restaurant.

• • •

The friends piled into two cars: Jacquelyn's Volkswagen GTI and Steele's Isuzu Rodeo. At a light on Seminole Boulevard, a silver Lexus IS300 stopped in between them.

When the light flickered green, the driver of the Lexus began to tailgate Jacquelyn. She braked once, in an attempt to get the Lexus to back away. Instead, the driver swerved in front of her, according to accounts given by Jacquelyn's friends to police.

At about 70 mph, she tried to get away as the Lexus continued to cut her off, police records state.

"What was his purpose?" Kathryn still wonders. "Why?"

Then, as the Lexus cut her off one last time near Commerce Drive N, Jacquelyn lost control of the wheel, her car swerved 180 degrees and it slammed into a utility pole in front of a restaurant.

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The Lexus sped off.

People gathered outside, among them a stranger who broke the Volks-wagen's back window with a shovel as smoke clouded the inside. Kathryn reached in and clutched Jacquelyn's arm, the only part of her friend that she could see within the wreckage.

Six hours later, Jacquelyn died at Bayfront Medical Center, now Bayfront Health St. Petersburg. She was buried with Susie and her soccer ball.

Kathryn and Brandon say they often think of what they could have done differently that morning: Why didn't they get the driver's tag number? Why didn't they call Jacquelyn on her cell phone? Why didn't they tell her to pull over?

Police know only the driver's description: a man possibly in his 20s or 30s, with dark short hair and a "distinct jaw line," records state. Detectives checked 135 vehicles of the same make and model within a 15-mile radius and interviewed witnesses. Brandon and Kathryn consented to hypnosis in an effort to pull the driver's tag number from their memories. It failed.

The case was closed in 2005.

• • •

Palfy, a Pinellas County Schools nurse, keeps the investigation file in a green portfolio, but never opens it. She thinks detectives did what they could to find the driver.

"I believe in giving it to a higher power," she said recently at her Seminole apartment. "I believe in karma. You know, they have to live with the consequences of their actions and nonactions. Jacquelyn paid the ultimate price."

She focuses on what she calls "rituals."

At her daughter's grave, Palfy places a carved pumpkin on Halloween, cake, flowers, and champagne on Jacquelyn's birthday, more flowers on Dec. 19, and a small Christmas tree during the holidays.

Lately, Palfy has begun scattering shells collected during walks on Indian Rocks Beach on Jacquelyn's grave. She has this one memory of her daughter as a baby on the beach, waddling on the sand until a wave knocked her down. On her own, she got up again.

"There's a major piece of my heart gone and there's scarring that is tremendous," Palfy said. "But you learn to adapt."

Times staff researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report. Contact Laura C. Morel at lmorel@tampabay.com or (727)445-4157. Follow @lauracmorel.