Emotional vigil for woman killed in crash
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BATON ROUGE - Holding back tears, a teenager remembered the moment a week ago, she tried to save her friend's life.
"I had opened her door, and I was like 'please wake up, please wake up,'" Cheryl Watson recalled. Watson survived the car crash that killed her friend Tashadow Gray. Watson said she was able to free herself from the mangled vehicle and made her way to Watson but was unable to pull her out of the vehicle.
Authorities suspect the driver who caused the crash, identified as T'Naia Burnette, was impaired at the time.
"Today marks one week since her life was taken away from her by a drunk driver. The family wants to make sure that the world knows that a good person was taken away at a very young age," a friend of Gray's family, Markita Verrel, said at a vigil near the crash site Tuesday evening. "We just want to make sure that the person that did this gets the fullest extent of the law."
"Drinking and driving is not something that should be done," she added.
Vigil tonight for Ta'Shadow Gray, 19-year-old who died in a car accident last week on Scenic Highway. pic.twitter.com/UY5HhsMxmi
— Brittany Weiss (@MsBWeiss) September 23, 2015
The crash happened on Scenic Highway near chemical plants. Late Tuesday, under a dark sky, family and friends gathered there and built a makeshift memorial.
Charges are pending against Burnette, who has a previous arrest for driving while intoxicated.
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