Orangeburg County, SC (WLTX) - A Florida woman and her two children who were killed when their SUV hit an alligator on a South Carolina interstate had been on a family trip when tragedy struck.
The collision on Interstate 95 early Monday morning took the lives of 24-year-old Amber Stanley, her 4-year-old son Jack, and her 2-year-old daughter, Autumn. The family was all from Callahan, Florida, which is just north of Jacksonville.
John Stanley, Amber's husband and the children's father, told People.com that the family had been on a trip to a friend's house in Myrtle Beach while he had been on a business trip to Pennsylvania.
Josh Stanley told People he'd tried to call his wife around the time of the accident, and when he didn't get a response, he knew something was wrong.
“I broke down,” Josh told People. “They were my life. Everything we had was built around each other. We were building our family up. I was just crying.”
At a park in Florida where his kids used to play, Stanley told WJAX in Jacksonville he hasn't even begun processing the loss.
"Thinking about all the fun we had and stuff, thinking about them playing on the playground swinging, and the times we had here knowing that we're not going to do that again," Josh said.
"Some kid said 'dad' and I'll turn around and it's not Jack or Autumn and for a split second it's just you know sort of like my brain expects them to be there but I know they're not so it's just been really hard."
Photos: Family Killed in Accident on I-95 in South Carolina
The couple had been married for three years.
Just before 1 a.m. Monday, Amber was driving their Kia Soul on I-95 near the I-26 interchange near Santee, SC when the vehicle hit a 9-foot-long alligator that was crossing the roadway.
The collision caused the car to go off the roadway, strike a tree, and burst into flames. All three died from the fire.
As of Tuesday afternoon, the alligator's carcass was still on the grassy side of the interstate. The dead animal had clear signs that it had been run over by the vehicle.
Even though alligators are common to the southern part of the state, Trooper Judd Jones with the South Carolina Highway Patrol says seeing alligators on the interstate is something out of the ordinary.
"It's definitely something that we don't see everyday on our roadways," said Lance Cpl. Judd Jones with the SC Highway. Patrol. "We have seen alligators before, but like I said, it's one of those things we don't see every day."