On Saturday, 38-year-old Kirk Walker and his cousin, 40-year-old Robert McLaurin, were driving down the Henry Hudson Parkway in New York City in a Dodge Challenger. Walker was a groom-to-be who was scheduled to get married to his fiancé Shauntea Weaver. He and his cousin were out for his bachelor party.
But seemingly out of nowhere, a wrong-way driver behind a pick-up truck slammed into their vehicle head-on, killing Walker and McLaurin almost instantly. Although the passenger has been caught, the driver is still on the run.
According to the New York Post, the driver also slammed into another car, a 2018 Audi S3, which led to the two men inside being sent to a local hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.
Walker is survived by his fiancé and three children.
More from the New York Post:
“I’m supposed to be in my wedding dress right now — not in mourning,” Walker’s devastated fiancée, Shauntea Weaver, 40, told The Post on the day the couple were to tie the knot in a huge ceremony at the Royal Manor wedding venue in Garfield, New Jersey.
“I feel like this is a TV show and I’m going to wake up any minute and go back to my real life,” Weaver said. “Every hour since it happened, I’m having a different emotion take me over.”
The couple had started a successful car rental business that had prospered thanks to Walker’s incredibly hard work, she added.
Weaver called the crash “devastating, and not just for me.”
Khadija Walker, the sister and cousin of Walker and McLaurin, was a few vehicles behind the Dodge Challenger when the crash occurred. She told ABC7 New York, “I had to live the tragedy. They don’t know what any of us felt that night when we all had to pick up my cousin’s body and move him away from the burning car.”
She continued, “Huge black smoke, and traffic is stopping, and you’re not understanding why. And you’re walking over glass and doors and the air bags and the oil, you slip because you couldn’t barely even get to them because there was so much oil on the ground.”
During a press conference on Tuesday, New York City Mayor Eric Adams offered to put up $1,000 of his money as a reward for the arrest and conviction of the mystery driver who is responsible for the tragic death of Walker and McLaurin.
Weaver has organized a GoFundMe in memory of her fiancé and his cousin.