Houston Chronicle
PLANTERSVILLE, Texas — A weekend car crash in Plantersville has left a young volunteer firefighter dead and a community in mourning.
Grimes County authorities said the firefighter, 20-year-old Harley Mullenix, was killed Saturday afternoon in a collision between a car carrying her and two other women and a Chevy Tahoe.
According to Grimes County authorities, a PT Cruiser carrying Mullenix and the other women — Ashley Hataway and Heather Wenzel — was traveling north on FM 1774, when it was struck in the back by a Chevy Tahoe. The three were waiting to turn onto County Road 302.
Mullenix died at the scene, according to Plantersville-Stoneham Volunteer Department Chief Michael Briggs, one of the first responders at the crash site.
Hattaway and Wenzel, who he said were both pregnant, were taken to Conroe Regional Medical Center. They are both in stable condition and their unborn children unharmed, authorities said, though one of the women will need surgery for a broken jaw. Wenzel is also a Plantersville volunteer firefighter.
DPS Trooper Kenneth Balzekas told the Montgomery County Police Reporter that drugs and alcohol were not factors in the crash.
The Tahoe’s driver did not apply his brakes before the impact, Balzekas told the Reporter.
“Something was distracting him, but we don’t know what it was,” he said.
The driver who hit them was also transported to the hospital. He was in stable condition Sunday, authorities said.
News of the death traveled fast through Plantersville, a small unincorporated town of a few hundred people located about 55 miles northwest of Houston.
Fire departments around the region lowered their flags to half-mast in memory of Mullenix, a 2014 graduate of Navasota High School, where she had been a member of The Diamonettes, the school’s drill team.
“She just loved life, and her friends,” said Omar Herrera, a Navasota junior. He met her last year in a theater program, soon after he’d gotten braces that were so painful he could barely eat.
Mullenix, who’d also had to wear braces, sat with him and commiserated, he said.
“She would lighten up anyone who was sad,” he said.
Mullenix, a hazel-eyed girl with a beaming smile and a cascade of wavy blond hair who loved to dance, joined the 15-person department as a junior firefighter when she was 15, Briggs said.
Because she had not yet gone to fire school, she couldn’t fight fires in interior structures, he said.
Nevertheless, she’d loved fighting wildfires. During a 2011 wildfire, Briggs recalled, they fought two nasty blazes, one of which almost overtook the truck he and Mullenix were in.
“We’re going to make it out alive,” he remembered telling her, grabbing her hand, punching the truck into gear and driving out of the path of the Dyer Mill fire.
On Saturday, he found himself at that intersection, trying to save her life.
“I can’t even start to talk about it,” the grief-stricken chief said. “I still had a job to do, and we did our job.”
On Sunday, he and the rest of the department’s 13 other firefighters were reeling from their friend’s death. The flag outside the station was at half-staff, and the sign above the station displayed her number, #820.
A funeral date will be set after authorities complete Mullenix’s autopsy.
Since her death, the department had received “thousands” of condolence messages, Briggs said, many of them from firefighters who’d fought the same fires she fought in 2011.
Said Briggs: “She was a wildfire herself.”
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