Victim of crash was his great-niece
By Joe Depriest
The Charlotte Observer
Copyright 2007 The Charlotte Observer
SOUTH POINT, N.C. — South Point Volunteer Fire Chief Tommy Wilson heard the emergency call on his truck radio.
A fatal wreck near a curve on two-lane South Point Road outside Belmont. Wilson knew the location well: In nearly 30 years with the department, Wilson had responded to about a dozen fatal wrecks there.
This would be his toughest. He drove from downtown Belmont to the scene, about a mile away, and made a chilling discovery: one of the victims was his 18-year-old great-niece, Ashley Rose Griffin, coming back to Belmont on spring break from UNC Wilmington. She died about a half-mile from home and a mile from South Point High School, where she graduated magna cum laude last year.
“You don’t want to break down in front of the firefighters,” said Wilson, 52. “You try to hold it back. But it’s hard.”
The wreck happened around 4 p.m. Wednesday in the 1500 block of South Point Road.
According to the N.C. Highway Patrol, Griffin’s Ford Focus was struck head-on by a 1997 Chevrolet pickup driven by 60-year-old Ronnie Jones, who lived nearby. Authorities said the pickup crossed the center line and that Jones may have been drinking. He died at the scene.
Griffin lived with her grandmother, Shirley Green, and had talked to her by cell phone earlier in the afternoon.
Wilson, who lives near Green, his sister, was headed to the Wal-Mart Supercenter in Belmont when he heard the wreck call.
When he got there, he could tell it was bad. But he didn’t realize who was in the Focus until he saw his sister in the crowd.
“She was all tore up,” Wilson said. “Then I knew.”
Griffin had a teaching scholarship to UNC Wilmington and was on the dean’s list. “She loved it there,” Green said of her granddaughter. “She had wanted to be a teacher since she was in the eighth grade.”
Wilson, who has to pass the site of the wreck daily, tries not to remember the horrible images he saw. He focuses on positive memories.
“She was happy all the time,” Wilson said. “She never complained about anything.”