GOLDEN GROVE, Hanover — Vanessa Spence’s father will forever regret that he didn’t tell his daughter to drive carefully as she left home for a night out on the town on Wednesday.

And he will forever wish her effort to save a neighbour’s life had ended with her being hailed a hero, instead of being one of two good Samaritans who died in a car crash.

“Mi nuh know when mi going to get over this. Mi go tell you the honest truth, mi sadly miss her!” Peter Spence told the Jamaica Observer from the family home in Golden Grove, Hanover, on Friday.

“Mi sit on the chair on the veranda here so watch them Wednesday evening going down here so, ennuh, and it come out a mi mouth done fi just say, ‘Unnu careful now, ennuh’,” added the heartbroken father, his voice heavy with regret.

Vanessa is survived by three children, ages nine, four, and one.

The 29-year-old, along with 16-year-old Brianna Smith and 26-year-old Aljay Ricketts, died after a borrowed Toyota Axio motor car, being driven by Spence, slammed into a parked water truck along the Haddo main road in Hanover about 11:30 pm Wednesday. The two women were among a group of people trying to get Ricketts, who was injured, to Savanna-la-Mar Hospital. He had been shot earlier at a bike show that was held in a nearby community called Bessie Baker.

On Friday, a grieving Paulette Robinson Spence took comfort in the bravery her daughter showed in trying to help her injured neighbour. Ricketts, she said, had a good rapport with many in the community, including her daughter.

“Maybe a lot of man round there and… she… see him get the shot and lie down there. How she so brave to take him up and move off with him as a woman?” she marvelled, adding that her daughter appeared to have been determined to help.

“She did park far away, mi hear, and she go for the car and come back and people put him inna the car and she move off,” said Robinson Spence.

Both distraught parents said they would have likely run for cover if they had been in their daughter’s shoes.

“Mi know mi as a man and mi hear gunshot, mi a tek weh miself,” her father said before hastily adding that he did not regret that she chose to help someone in need. He just rued the tragic outcome.

If only she had made it safely to the hospital, he mused, she would have been hailed for her bravery.

“Mi can just imagine if it did work out,” he said.

Like the Spences, Brianna Smith’s mother, Karen Smith, has her fair share of regret. Not one who usually allows her daughter to go out at night, she made an exception on Wednesday.

“Her sister came last week [from overseas] and she said that she wanted to go with her to the bike show. So I say, ‘OK, go with her, but make sure you come back by 9:00 pm,’” the mother explained.

“At 11 o’clock, I didn’t see them so I’m saying, ‘Where are they?’ And then after that now it’s like something come to me, a spirit just come to me and say, ‘Where you go get money bury Brianna?’ That time I didn’t hear anything [about her death] as yet,” she disclosed.

Shortly after, her husband’s friend called to tell him of the car crash.

“I am broken down; I cry. I try to laugh [but] I cry because I miss her. When she was leaving the night she say, ‘Mommy, love you.’ And I say, ‘Be careful, don’t drink anything around there, just come back at 9:00 pm.’ That was it!” the tearful mother of the Anchovy High School student lamented.

Her teenage daughter, she said, was quiet but outspoken. She had a sense of fashion and loved to dress up, and her young niece loved her dearly.

Like Smith, Vanessa Spence’s parents were on Friday clinging to good memories of their child. Everyone got on with her, they said.

“Is a woman that give no problem and there is not one persons who call me [to offer] condolence that nuh have good to say,” said Peter Spence as his wife nodded in agreement.