Woman charged in wrong-way DUI crash that killed a mother and 2 children, police say

LEE COUNTY, Ga. (WALB/Gray News) — A driver is facing charges in connection with a wrong-way crash in Georgia that killed a mother and two of her children.

Sherita Goddard, 41, is accused of driving under the influence and driving the wrong way on U.S. 82 in Lee County on Jan. 14.

The Lee County Sheriff’s Office said Goddard crashed into the family’s oncoming vehicle, killing 32-year-old Bernedine Spann, 13-year-old Ja’Leah Spann and 7-year-old Jaxton Spann.A woman and two of her children were killed in a crash involving a wrong-way driver in Georgia. (Source: WALB)

Goddard’s daughter, who investigators said was in the vehicle with Goddard, was also injured in the crash.

The Lee County Sheriff’s Office said Goddard is charged with:

• Three counts of first-degree homicide by vehicle
• Endangering a child by driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs
• Felony second-degree cruelty to children
• Driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs
• Driving on wrong side of a roadway
• Having an open container in the vehicle

Goddard was released on bond Wednesday.

Officials said Bernedine and Ja’Leah Spann died at the scene. Jaxton Spann died days later at the hospital.

Family and friends of the victims are hoping for full accountability.

Shonda James, who said she was Bernedine’s best friend for 10 years, said she was not only devastated but incredibly angry over the situation.

“She [Goddard] needs to be held accountable to the full extent. She killed people — they did not have to die. She needs to take accountability. She needs to go to jail. I have no sympathy. I have no forgiveness for her at this moment,” James said.

James added, “It was negligent for them to let her drive drunk from wherever she was coming from and it’s the fact that she did not care, she made a conscious decision to get behind the wheel with children in her car and drive on the wrong side of the freaking road.”

Randolph County Schools confirmed Ja’Leah Spann was an eighth-grade student and Jaxton Spann was a second-grade student.

Randolph County Schools said in a statement that counseling and support services would be available to students and staff.

A GoFundMe was set up to support the family.

According to the GoFundMe page, Bernedine leaves behind another son, who was not in the vehicle at the time of the crash. The page said he is “now grieving the devastating loss of his mother, brother and sister.”

Copyright 2026 WALB via Gray Local Media, Inc. All rights reserved.

She Seemed Like ‘the Perfect Mom’ Before Driving Her Minivan Into Highway Traffic and Killing 8. Why?

It’s been nearly 16 years since the historic crash. Now an investigator looks back at the one question he still asks himself about Diane Schuler

By 

Johnny Dodd

Johnny Dodd

Johnny Dodd is a senior writer at PEOPLE, who focuses on human interest, crime and sports stories.

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• On July 26, 2009, Diane Schuler drove the wrong way on the Taconic State Parkway and killed eight, including her daughter.
• Tests showed she was drunk and stoned — but her family insisted there was more to the story
• “I just felt that it was a tragedy,” an investigator on the case tells PEOPLE

It’s been almost 16 years since that terrible summer afternoon in July 2009 when Diane Schuler, a 36-year-old doting mother of two young children, took a wrong turn on the Taconic State Parkway in Westchester County, N.Y., and killed eight people, including herself, her daughter and three nieces.

What happened that day shattered many families and still haunts those who were caught up in the tragedy.

“I just drove down the parkway today,” says Thomas Ruskin, a former New York City police detective who spent several months working as a private investigator for Daniel Schuler, Diane’s husband, digging into what really caused his wife’s erratic and ultimately deadly driving.

“There’s often flowers there at the crash site,” Ruskin tells PEOPLE, “but today I noticed someone put a cross up in the snow where all the cars ended up.”

Even after more than a decade, the question of why Diane — an apparently hardworking, responsible supervisor for Cablevision, described by friends as “the perfect mom” — could have acted like that behind the wheel has become a heart-wrenching enigma that Ruskin and others are still trying to understand.

“How she ended up traveling southbound on the northbound lane of the Taconic is one of those unanswered questions that I’ll take to my grave,” says Ruskin, president of CMP Protective and Investigative Group. “There’s no explaining it.”  

On the surface, the facts behind the worst car crash in Westchester County in 90 years are fairly straightforward.

Diane and then-37-year-old Daniel had spent the weekend swimming and playing with their two kids and three nieces at the Hunter Lake Campground in New York’s Catskill Mountains. The family packed up and began their drive back to their home in West Babylon, N.Y., at 9:30 a.m. local time on July 26, 2009.

Diane was driving a minivan with the five kids and Daniel was in his truck, along with luggage and the family dog.

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“The kids were yelling out the window, saying they had fun and couldn’t wait to come back,” campground owner Ann Scott told PEOPLE days later.

During Diane’s drive home, she stopped at a McDonald’s where witnesses told investigators that they saw no signs she was in physical distress. She later stopped at a Sunoco gas station where she reportedly asked a clerk for an over-the-counter pain relief medication that the store did not sell.

At 11:37 a.m. Diane’s 8-year-old niece, Emma Hance, called her father, Warren, Diane’s older brother, to let him know they were running late.

Before hanging up, Warren spoke briefly with Diane, later recalling that she sounded normal.

A half hour later, eyewitnesses began calling 911 to report seeing the red minivan driving erratically and aggressively, darting in and out of traffic, and tailgating other cars.

Emma called her dad back at 12:58 p.m. to relay an ominous message that they were lost and Diane was having difficulty seeing.

“There’s something wrong with Aunt Diane,” the girl said.

Warren called his sister and was disturbed by their short conversation. He later described Diane as sounding “disoriented,” while she continually slurred her words and called him “Danny.”

Diane had downplayed the situation, saying of Emma and the kids, “They’re just being silly. They’re playing.”

Warren pleaded with Diane to wait where she was on the side of the highway and he would come get them. He attempted to call her back multiple times, but the calls went unanswered.

Police believe that it was sometime around 1:30 p.m. when Diane got back on the road and drove up the exit ramp of the Taconic Parkway and then, according to several witnesses, began speeding at over 80 mph into oncoming traffic — reportedly causing more than a dozen drivers to swerve out of her way.

One of those drivers was Corey Lowe, who previously recounted to PEOPLE what it was like watching the vehicle barrel straight toward them.

“For a minute we were like, ‘Is that a car?’ ” Lowe — who noted that the minivan “wasn’t swerving; she stayed in a straight line” — said in 2009.

“It came speeding past us at like 80 mph,” he said. “It was the eeriest thing I ever saw.”

For nearly two miles other drivers were somehow able to veer out of Diane’s path. Her luck finally ran out near Briarcliff Manor, N.Y., as she rounded a blind curve and collided head-on with an oncoming SUV.

In the blink of an eye, eight people were dead: Diane, her 2-year-old daughter, Erin, and her nieces Emma, Alyson, 7, and 5-year-old Kate, along with the passengers in the SUV, Michael Bastardi, 81, his son Guy, 49, and their longtime friend Daniel Longo, 74.

The only survivor was Diane’s 5-year-old son, Bryan, who sustained a serious head injury that resulted in nerve damage to his right eye.

Those who witnessed the collision and sprang into action afterwards described the scene to PEOPLE in 2009 as nothing short of horrific.

“People were running to the car screaming, ‘We need help, there are kids in there!’ ” said Peter Dedvukaj, who pulled four children — two of the little girls were dead — out of the twisted, burning minivan.

“There was nothing we could do. The third girl had a pulse, but she died later. I was crying the whole time,” Dedvukaj said. “The kids weren’t moving. They weren’t breathing. They looked like angels.”  

The tragedy took an even more bewildering twist nine days later when Westchester County officials released the results of toxicology tests that revealed Diane had alcohol in her bloodstream that was twice the legal limit in New York.

Police, who discovered a broken bottle of Absolut vodka in the wreckage, described her blood alcohol level as the equivalent of consuming 10 shots of alcohol in an hour. They also found evidence that Diane had smoked marijuana shortly before the crash.

The new details proved unfathomable for some of those who felt they knew Diane best — and infuriated those who didn’t.

“This is so out of the realm of possibility, it just blows my mind,” said her best friend, Christine Lipani, one of several loved ones who told PEOPLE at the time that the Diane they remembered was a devoted parent and virtual teetotaler.

Her husband of seven years echoed that sentiment. “She was not an alcoholic,” Daniel said two days after the autopsy findings were released, insisting that his wife may have been suffering from some sort of medical crisis — such as a painful tooth abscess — that led to the reckless driving.

“I never saw her drunk since the day I met her,” he said.

But others clearly had. By that November The New York Times reported Diane’s sister-in-law Joan Schuler had told investigators after the crash that Diane “smoked marijuana virtually every single day of her life” and described her as a “hard drinker.”

The refusal by Daniel and other relatives to accept the findings of his wife’s toxicology report — despite tests ruling out a stroke or aneurysm as a possible cause of the crash — was the focus of the disturbing 2011 HBO documentary There’s Something Wrong With Aunt Diane.

The wreck also drew attention to concerns about whether busy roadways, including the Taconic, were sufficiently marked to prevent wrong-way collisions, though experts agreed that Diane had to have driven right past warning signs.

Investigator Ruskin had Diane’s blood samples retested for Daniel and his attorney. The findings of those tests mirrored the results detailed in the official autopsy report released by Westchester County officials.

“She was definitely drunk and high at the time of the accident,” he says now.

Ruskin says he had a falling out with Daniel and his lawyers after learning Daniel planned to move forward with lawsuits, including alleging that the New York highway where his wife crashed was poorly designed. (There have reportedly been settlements in at least four of the suits stemming from the wreck; the Schuler family has avoided the spotlight in recent years.)

“I just felt that it was a tragedy,” Ruskin says, “and they should let Diane and everyone else rest in peace and not stir it up further with litigation.”

For the families and friends of those killed by Diane in 2009, there is probably no explanation that will ever bring closure.

“People always ask how I feel about Diane,” her sister-in-law Jackie Hance told Ladies’ Home Journal in 2011. “You can’t imagine how complex that question is. How does a person go from being like a sister to me — adored by my girls and cherished by my husband — to being the one who ruined our lives?”

Jackie went on to write a memoir, I’ll See You Again, and her family started a foundation in her girls’ name, focused on confidence, self-esteem and self-worth. Jackie and Warren also had another child, a girl.

“I thought it was such a sad thing that all those people would never get to know them,” she told PEOPLE in 2013. “Now, in a way, they will.”

All these years later, Ruskin continually asks himself the same question that so many others have asked.

“To this day, I have often wondered — was she trying to commit suicide or was she so intoxicated that she didn’t even know what she was doing?” he says. “Would she really want to hurt herself with all those little, innocent children in the car? That’s something I don’t think we’ll ever know.”

Mother of 5 killed in suspected DUI crash in Madera County

MADERA COUNTY, Calif. (KFSN) — As Super Bowl Sunday approaches, the California Highway Patrol says its officers are getting ready for big-time enforcement the night of the big game.

“We are going to have every available officer out on the roadway,” says Madera CHP Officer Javier Ruvalcaba. “They are going to be looking for aggressive and impaired drivers.”

Last Super Bowl Sunday, the CHP says five people were killed and 105 were hurt in alcohol-involved crashes on California roads

That same day, CHP officers made 229 DUI arrests.

Officer Ruvalcaba says Madera CHP has seen more DUI crashes since January 1 than what’s typical for the start of the year.

“This is unpredictable,” he said. “These crashes are happening all around the county, county roads, freeways.”

He says most of the deadly crashes in the Madera area are caused by DUI drivers.

“Special units that have been going throughout the Central Valley, highway patrol units that have been targeting areas,” he said.

The most recent victim — 49-year-old Patricia Vargas — a mother of five and grandmother of four.

CHP says 33-year-old Miguel Hernandez was driving north on Road 27 before quickly turning left onto Avenue 17 in Madera County.

Patricia swerved to avoid hitting him and into oncoming traffic, hitting a trailer truck head-on.

Patricia’s family says she, her daughter and another passenger were headed to the grocery store to pick up a loaf of bread around 6 Wednesday evening when they crashed.

The CHP says Patricia’s 11-year-old daughter and another adult passenger were taken to the hospital. The family says they are both out of the ICU now and are going to be okay.

Hernandez was booked into jail on multiple charges, including a DUI with three priors and murder.

The CHP is asking people to pay attention to drivers on the road who could be under the influence.

“It’s an emergency,” Ruvalcaba said. “It’s a true emergency, so call 911. We want to hear from you.”