Tiffany Ann Woodham called her mother Sunday night to tell her the contractions had started, meaning the baby girl she had named Novalee might arrive sooner than expected, Baynews 9 reported.
Minutes later, Woodham and her unborn daughter were dead, struck in their minivan by a suspected drunk driver at a Winter Haven, Fla., intersection.
"I am so upset about it I can't even cry," her brother, Cody Breton, told the station. "Every day I would wake up and rub my sister's stomach and tell her how much I loved her."
On Wednesday, the family was seeking to raise more than $6,000 for funeral costs and did not have insurance, the Daily Ridge reported. They handed out t-shirts with the words "Don’t Drink & Drive" on the front and, on the back, "Because It Took Their Lives" with a photo of Tiffany.
"Tiffany would do anything for anybody," Teresa Hidle, Woodham's mother, told the news outlet. "She didn’t care who it was or what the situation, she would always help someone out."
Woodham, 19, from Bartow, Fla., was in the left backseat of the van that had stopped at a red light around 10 p.m., police said, according to The Ledger.
Thirty-seven-year-old Thomas Jeremy Dick, driving a pickup truck, slammed into the back of the van at more than 80 miles an hour as the light turned green. Woodham died as she was being taken to the hospital. Doctors attempted an emergency C-section to save Novalee, who was originally due Nov. 14, but she didn't make it.
Dick had been seen swerving off the road before the collision, said police, who measured his blood alcohol at almost twice the legal limit. Dick faces vehicular homicide, DUI manslaughter and other charges.
"It infuriates us because we have a 19-year-old young lady dead and her baby's dead because someone cares so little about life that they'll drink and drive," Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd told 10 News. (See above video.)
Police said Dick showed little remorse and was more concerned about the condition of his truck, according to the station.
Zachary D. Rowles, Woodham's 22-year-old fiance and father of their unborn child, suffered non-life threatening injures, as did the driver of the van, Tawnya T. White. But a fourth passenger, Pamela D. Cheverier, was airlifted to a hospital with serious injuries.
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