Background: This story was submitted as my master’s project at the Columbia Journalism School. I don’t often get the chance to write longform, narrative journalism and jumped at the opportunity. Special thanks to my advisor and editor, Kevin Coyne, for his wisdom, guidance and unrelenting encouragement.
Type her name into Google. Start from the top.
Click.
There she is, 23 years old and on top of the world.
She’s Sunny, manager of the World Wrestling Federation tag team champions. She’s one of the most popular people in the professional wrestling world, even though she’s not a wrestler herself.
She’s in the get-up she wears on television every week, with blond hair perfectly teased above her shoulders and a big smile — all teeth, with the kind of bright red lipstick you rarely see in real life.
Click.
She’s in an American flag bikini, with stars on the top and stripes on the bottom. She’s leaning against the trunk of a red convertible, a Ford. She’s wearing socks and roller skates, raising her eyebrows at the camera, with a shit-eating grin. No lipstick this time.
Her catchphrase, at the time, is “what Sunny wants, Sunny gets.”
Click.
There’s a video, now. She’s in a formal, strapless red dress with diamonds lining the cleavage. She’s older now, but still pretty. She always exuded confidence, but it’s a little different here. Like she’s seen a thing or two.
“Life has been a roller coaster for me. I think most of you know that. That’s the easiest way to explain my life,” she tells the sold-out arena crowd in Atlanta through a thick New Jersey accent. “But everything comes full circle and, here I am, back in the WWE in the Hall of Fame.”
Click.
She’s much older now. And is she…? Yeah, she’s naked. Trying to look seductive, despite the terribly dim lighting and the awkward angles. Trying to get you to spend the $30 it will cost to see the woman who used to be Sunny, to watch her —
Click. Click. Click.
She has the hint of a smile, almost as a formality. Her eyeliner is dark but the bags under her eyes seem darker. Her hair, as blond as ever, is matted.
It’s a mugshot. Not her first.
Tamara Lynn Sytch looks like she’s just stopped crying.
● ● ●
What’s going on?
She woke up in a hospital bed in Florida to a police officer asking about a car crash she couldn’t remember.
“What’s going on?” she asked — numerous times, according to the police report. “What’s going on?”
The officer, from the Ormond Beach Police Department, tried to ask Tamara Lynn Sytch — Tammy, to anyone who knew her — for her address, but she refused. She hadn’t been involved in a crash, she said.
The next cop, Detective Thomas Garcia, had better luck. Sytch was “alert and coherent,” and the story she told was simple: Sytch had been heating up leftover burritos in her kitchen on Oak Avenue in Ormond Beach. She drank some vodka — she didn’t know how much, she told Garcia.
It was her “go-to.”
She went to the Wawa on West Granada Boulevard to fill up her car, a white Mercedes convertible. Maybe she went to the 7-Eleven, the one by the beach? She was looking for diet iced tea.
It was hard to remember, she said.
It wasn’t the first time she’d talked to the cops, in Ormond Beach or elsewhere. It wasn’t even the first time she’d woken up in a hospital, told she’d been found passed out in her car with an open bottle of Grey Goose in arm’s reach.
But this time, there was another vehicle. Another driver. And he’d died before Sytch even woke up.
● ● ●
Professional wrestling is a storytelling business. People pay money to watch athletes leap from the top turnbuckle, perform feats of strength and smack each other with folding chairs. But it’s all in the service of a story — they’re really more like actors, playing characters with backstories and motivations to go along with the physical routines.
The best wrestling storylines are based in reality — a real-life love triangle or backstage underdog story translates into a 20-minute beat-’em-up. It’s a business where true, certifiable facts are hard to come by — and where everyone’s trying to put one over on everyone else.
The same is true with Tammy Lynn Sytch. There’s little corroboration, but a whole lot of exaggeration and embellishment. That’s the way professional wrestlers — all storytellers, really — tend to operate.
Sytch wrote an autobiography in 2012, a 40-year-old woman less than a year removed from being inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame. It was purportedly written while she was in jail — the first time — but has the same formula as any C-lister’s tell-all: The behind-the-scenes stories of big moments. A whole lot of smut. A glaring lack of self-awareness.
The last line of the introduction is: “Heartbroken. Cheated. Lied to. Betrayed. Used. Abused. Degraded. Demeaned. Brutalized. Hurt. Ashamed. Embarrassed. In a word, shattered.”
The first line of the first chapter is a Bible quote.
The basics, though, are clear: Tamara Lynn Sytch was born in December 1972 in New Jersey to a barrel-chested steelworker, Raymond, and a stay-at-home mom, Noreen. She was the youngest of four kids by a long shot, 16 years younger than her closest sibling.
Raymond was still in the Navy when his youngest daughter was born. He showed up drunk to the delivery room, shouting that his daughter wasn’t going to be named Jennifer. He had a new name in mind, waving a locally-distilled bottle of “Tamara” vodka.
Or so the story goes.
The first time I learned that Sytch was from Old Bridge, New Jersey, was when I started researching this story. It was surprising, as I consider myself a bit of an amateur historian on the town I’ve lived in since I was 6 years old. My town.
What Old Bridge may lack in influence, history or impact it makes up for with a strange list of people who reached minor fame: The gymnast Laurie Hernandez, who won a gold medal at the 2016 Summer Olympics. Minkah Fitzpatrick, an all-pro safety for the Steelers. Doug Emhoff, the Second Gentleman of the United States, who still claims to be from Matawan, our easterly neighbor (he moved to California as a teenager).
In a span of four years, Cedar Ridge High School counted among its graduates a platinum-selling pop singer (Vitamin C), a novelist and Pulitzer Prize winner (Junot Diaz), the guy who played Dante in “Clerks” (Brian O’Halloran) … and Tammy Lynn Sytch.
I learned about the Vitamin C connection when I was barely 11 years old, with “Graduation” near the top of the charts as I graduated from elementary school. And Diaz makes his upbringing in the Parlin area of Old Bridge an integral part of his writing.
But Sytch? You have to dig to find even a nugget of information about her upbringing in Old Bridge, New Jersey.
She once posted an old photo on Facebook with two dozen of her classmates sitting and standing on desks. Sytch is wearing a red sweater with a thin gold necklace, and a thin smile on her face. Her blond hair is tied up in a side ponytail in a sea of girls with teased, permed hairdos. This is the early 1990s, after all, with Bon Jovi at the height of their popularity (the entire band grew up within a few minutes of Old Bridge).
Sytch is all over her senior yearbook, as any editor-in-chief might be. But she has a knack for winding up in the most visible spot for every picture: front row center, as co-captain of the 1989-90 varsity cheerleading squad; top row, a head taller than the other people around her, with the ski club and the National Honor Society; posing at the left, with her arm on her hip, while the other Garden State Commended Scholars are just sort of clumped together.
She’d grown up going to wrestling shows in New Jersey as a kid, but it stopped being a fascination by her senior year. At least, until she attended a show in the gym at the other high school in town.
She attended the show on a whim and fell head over heels in love, almost immediately, with an 18-year-old wrestler named Chris Candido. He was from a small seaside town called Spring Lake, a little less than an hour away. Professional wrestling was in his blood — his grandfather had been an undercard wrestler in the 1970s, and Candido began training when he was just 14 years old.
Sytch and Candido would become attached at the hip for their entire adult lives, until he died from pneumonia — a complication of a blood clot during surgery — in 2005.
As she was getting ready to graduate from high school, Sytch turned down the University of Miami to follow Candido to Memphis, where he’d booked his first full-time wrestling gig with Smoky Mountain Wrestling — one of the last independent wrestling territories remaining, after the WWE had bought out the rest.
She eventually began taking classes at the University of Tennessee and, in her free time, taking promotional photos of Candido and action shots from his matches so he could get publicity in the wrestling magazines — a big deal for pre-Internet wrestling fans.
She accompanied Candido to the shows and spent enough time around the company that she caught the eye of Smoky Mountain Wrestling promoter Jim Cornette. Before long, he turned to her as a potential “manager,” someone who can rile up a crowd for or against the wrestler they’re paired with — often a wrestler who may have the biggest muscles and put on an exciting match but can’t string the right sentences together to get spectators invested in the storyline.
In short: Sytch could get the crowd to hate whatever wrestler she was managing. They would boo when her wrestlers won. They would cheer when her wrestlers lost.
It’s not uncommon for a manager to get more fan reaction than the wrestler — especially when they adopt the gimmick of a Wellesley College alumna who idolizes Hillary Clinton, as Sytch did in front of raucous crowds of western Tennessee conservatives in the early 1990s.
“She was a great promo. She could hit all the points. She could remember things. She’d say things naturally,” Cornette said on his podcast in 2017. “She had a feel for being at ringside. She got tremendous heat — people hated her worse than they hated me.”
The big break came in 1995, when the WWF — now known as WWE, pro wrestling’s biggest company both then and now — came calling. Sytch was hired to host call-in shows and highlight reels at the company’s Connecticut studios three days per week.
When Candido was hired by the WWF soon after, Sytch was brought on as his manager. The two adopted a fitness guru gimmick, in the vein of fitness infomercial star Tony Little. Together they were the “Bodydonnas” — bodybuilders and primadonnas who would scold the crowds for being fat and out-of-shape.
Candido was christened “Skip.”
Sytch, 22, was given the name “Sunny.”
● ● ●
The first time Ormond Beach Police Detective Richard Taylor talked to Tammy Lynn Sytch, he’s pretty sure she was drunk. It was 12:50 p.m. on May 5, according to the police report he filed.
In the five weeks since the crash, Taylor called Sytch — her cell phone still had a New Jersey area code — on a near-daily basis. It went to voicemail every time.
But then she called him.
She asked about her “Louie” — the Louis Vuitton purse that police had found on the floor of the passenger seat, next to the open bottle of vodka. She asked about coming into the station to pick up her identification card. It wasn’t a driver’s license; hers had been suspended for years.
When Taylor told her to make an appointment so she and a lawyer could pick up the license and discuss the crash as part of his investigation, Sytch grew frustrated.
“Sytch reported that she has not come in to speak with me because she is afraid that I would put her in handcuffs,” Taylor wrote in the police report.
She wasn’t necessarily wrong.
The lab results had come back about a week after the crash and showed Sytch had a blood alcohol content level of 0.280, more than three and a half times the legal limit.
And Taylor had talked to four witnesses.
One watched a white Mercedes, with Sytch allegedly behind the wheel, plow into the back of a Kia Sorrento which, in turn, slammed into the back of a GMC SUV — the other three witnesses were in that car.
Taylor had even had a few conversations with James Pente, Sytch’s 41-year-old fiancé, who came into the station trying to pick up the ID card as Taylor continued trying to get Sytch on the phone.
She’d been hounded by people “chasing money,” Pente said — as if people assumed she had millions. In reality, her only regular income was through her OnlyFans page, where she posted nude pictures and sex videos (Pente was her co-star) to subscribers who paid as much as $30 a month.
It worked out to thousands of dollars per month, he told Taylor — “fuckin’ good money.”
But he’d been the one handling the website for the better part of a week, Pente said.
“That shit took the life out of her,” he told Taylor. “She just sleeps, like she is a poster child for depression.”
When Taylor hung up with Sytch, another officer told him about another case that came in overnight from Daytona Beach. A woman was found passed out on the sidewalk in front of Robbie O’Connell’s Pub, unable to stand on her own. She was flagged for a follow-up: Tamara Lynn Sytch.
Taylor signed the charging affidavit the next day.
A warrant was issued for Sytch’s arrest, for a DUI causing death and driving with a suspended license and causing death.
He wrote: “She has constantly, publicly expressed a blatant disregard for the safety of herself and others.”
If convicted, she would face up to 26 years in a Florida state prison.
The cops found her, a half-hour later, at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Daytona Beach.
● ● ●
To hear Sytch tell it, “Sunny” was an overnight success.
She was still the manager of the Bodydonnas tag team every week on Monday Night Raw, the WWE’s flagship television show. But it wasn’t long until her first swimsuit photo shoot for the WWF’s magazine, in early 1996.
“Almost overnight, my fan response grew from a third of the crowd cheering for me to an overwhelming positive response from all of them! It was incredible,” she wrote in her autobiography.
“Do you see what showing a little skin can do?”
She’d already been “Sunny” for a few months, but this is as close to an origin story as you can find in a business that openly rewrites its own history. “Lady wrestling” was as old as wrestling itself, but often dismissed as a sideshow-like spectacle, the same way fans talked about dwarf matches.
But as the WWF faced more competition in the mid-1990s, it leaned into more PG-13 programming, eschewing what had been all-ages, family-friendly entertainment into racier matches, storylines and costumes in the hopes of bringing in teenagers and young adults. Stone Cold Steve Austin gave his real and fictional boss the middle finger. D-Generation X told the same boss to “suck it,” a phrase that prepubescent boys would anger their parents and teachers with for years.
Before all that, there was Sunny. Her picture, with a red bra poking out from an unbuttoned blouse, was plastered on T-shirts with the words “I like it…RAW.”
Sunny’s popularity — as the No. 1 sex symbol on a television show on the verge of mainstream success — skyrocketed. In the fall of 1996, she was listed as the “most downloaded celebrity” on America Online.
“She doesn’t lack confidence,” said Tom Prichard, the other half of the Bodydonnas tag team, in an interview with the Wrestling Shoot Interviews YouTube channel. “She didn’t care about what anyone thought or what she did or what she said. She was the most downloaded celebrity on AOL and, by god, ‘I’m a sex symbol and I want every picture and every cover.’
“Well, just wait, sweetheart. It doesn’t last forever.”
Her fame didn’t last long. She managed three sets of tag team champions in a row before eventually being relegated to more of a model than a performer.
“They would hit my music, I’d walk down the stage and ramp wearing an Undertaker T-shirt and walk back,” she wrote. “That’s it.”
Sytch blames her downfall on backstage drama with Sable, who quickly replaced her as the company’s de facto sex symbol.
Of course, she’d also had an affair with one of the company’s top stars (Shawn Michaels), started drinking (a Dewar’s and soda, also with Michaels) and taking pills (muscle relaxers).
Meanwhile, Candido had already jumped ship to Extreme Championship Wrestling, the upstart Philadelphia-based promotion that featured more wrestlers of his size — Candido stood 5-foot- 8; The Rock, by comparison, was 6-foot-5.
Vince McMahon, the longtime owner of the WWF, had a big brother-little brother relationship with ECW, occasionally letting talent, like Sunny, appear on ECW programming. The crowd loved her, and ECW promised her more money, more merchandise and control over her own storylines if she could sign with them full-time.
But she had to get out of her WWF contract first.
“How would I get out of that without the noncompete clause taking effect? Well, get fired.”
In early 1998, she grabbed a microphone and announced “ECW is my new home” on the promotion’s weekly television show, which went head-to-head with Monday Night Raw.
She got a fax releasing her from her WWF contract the next day.
● ● ●
Outside the Hard Rock, the officer cradled Sytch’s head while leading her into the back seat. Sytch shuffled into place, like she’d been there before — leaning back so she could get her legs and cushy white slippers inside the car.
She had, of course, been there before.
The body-worn camera video shows Sytch spell her last name for the Ormond Beach and Daytona Beach police officers and ask for some water, numerous times.
“I have a completely dry mouth. Like cotton mouth,” she said.
Two days later in court, she wore a gray shirt and a white sweater, with a KN-95 face mask. A reporter with the Daytona Beach News-Journal snapped an iPhone picture of her reaching back trying to hold hands with Pente.
They were only close enough to touch fingertips.
She got out the next day on a $227,500 bond — Pente paid $22,000, the 10% requirement — but the prosecutors changed their minds 24 hours later, once they pulled her driving history.
Ashley Terwilleger, the assistant state attorney for Volusia County, read aloud Sytch’s prior convictions. Three DUIs. Violating probation. Another DUI. There were more DUIs she didn’t mention, the ones that had been dismissed as part of plea deals.
Sytch should await trial in jail, Terwilleger argued. Steven DeLaroche, Sytch’s attorney, promised she would stay home wearing an ankle monitor and an alcohol sensor.
It wouldn’t do any good, Judge Karen Foxman replied.
“The defendant is a threat to the community, and I do not feel a monitor will protect the community,” Foxman says. “It is too easy to evade.”
Sytch pulled down her face mask and wrapped her arms around Pente. They stared at each other, forehead against forehead, just for a second. They kissed.
As the bailiff ushered her toward the door, she muttered something to Pente and pulled her facemask back up. She was in handcuffs.
The handcuffs were back on when she returned to the courtroom three weeks later. This time, she was in an orange jumpsuit.
Her arraignment only lasted a minute or two, just enough for DeLaroche to plead not guilty on her behalf. As she walked back through the door out of the courtroom, she did a half-wave with one of her hands, shackled near her waist.
The reporters caught up with Pente outside the courtroom, as he headed toward the stairs to the lobby. He was mad about his $22,000, about confusion over who actually owned the car Sytch crashed.
“I think that in this whole process, everybody’s been hurt — not just the family. I feel terrible for that guy’s family,” he said, according to the News-Journal.
He and Sytch were in love, he said. And she had become like a mother to his children.
“I’m upset about losing the love of my life, the mother of my children and everything that I have to look forward to,” Pente said.
On her attorney’s recommendation, Sytch hadn’t talked to anyone about her case, Pente said. Her new attorney, Jessica Roberts, didn’t respond to my requests for an interview, nor did Pente or Sytch herself, at an email address she uses for bookings.
“Of course, she feels bad. Absolutely everybody does,” Pente said. “Everybody’s life has been ruined by this. She’s never been the same since this happened.
“It destroyed her. It really has.”
● ● ●
The first time I typed Tammy Lynn Sytch’s driver’s license number into a New Jersey court search engine, I got an error message. My search had “exceeded the maximum allowable results.” There were so many violations that the system couldn’t process them and spit out a list.
By all accounts, it seems the legal wrangling started in 2012. She’d been living with her boyfriend-turned-fiancé, Damien Selvaggio, an independent wrestler who goes by the ring name “Damien Darling.”
Sytch’s autobiography claims her first arrests were the result of relationship issues. She found out he cheated. He denied it. She got drunk. They got in a fight, and she put him in a guillotine choke hold — a mixed martial arts move. When Selvaggio came to, he called the cops.
The same scenario — a revelation, a bender, an argument, a fight and a 911 call — played out the next two nights as well. After three arrests in three days, Sytch was ordered to spend 10 days in an alcohol rehabilitation facility.
The fourth and fifth arrests came a little over a week later. The fifth time, she was caught breaking into Selvaggio’s apartment. Sytch said she had to get her belongings so she could leave for good. The complaint says she was passed out, drunk, on his couch.
She was charged with burglary and spent three weeks in jail in lieu of paying a $100,000 bond, but the couple reconciled shortly thereafter. It lasted five days.
Revelation. Bender. Argument. Fight. Arrest No. 6.
"When Tamara is sober, she is an amazing person,” Selvaggio said in a statement at the time. “But when she drinks, she is an uncontrollable, violent demon.”
The situation with Selvaggio serves as the backdrop for Sytch’s book, bookending her life story with woe-is-me ramblings purportedly written from a jail cell. The 35th chapter is titled “So Much for My Happy Ending.”
In reality, she’d already been arrested at least once for driving while under the influence, in Aberdeen, New Jersey, in 2005. The charge was dropped and she pleaded guilty to a reckless driving charge, but the fines weren’t fully paid until 2016, according to court records.
In July 2016, she told the wrestling journalist Bill Apter that her drinking started spiraling out of control after Candido died in 2005. “The whole drinking thing has been like a roller coaster,” she said. “I’ve had my times of sobriety and then, boom, my times of binging. It keeps going up and down.”
At the time, court records show that she received four DUIs in New Jersey and Pennsylvania over the span of nine months in 2015 and 2016. She served four months in a Pennsylvania jail after violating probation with the DUI in New Jersey.
“Last year seemed to be a little bit out of control, so that’s why I went back to rehab,” she said. “It was the best decision I ever made. I encourage anyone and everyone who has any type of substance abuse problem to seek help. It’s the best thing you can do, and it’ll save your life.”
The next DUIs in New Jersey came in January and February 2018, along with open container and reckless driving tickets. In December 2018, she refused to consent to an alcohol breath test in Holmdel, New Jersey.
The seventh DUI arrest came in Seaside Heights, New Jersey, in February 2019. The eighth was in Middletown, New Jersey, in July 2020, along with an alleged assault related to a domestic violence incident.
She pleaded guilty to resisting arrest, but the other charges were dropped.
“It’s a fact of life. I drank and I drove and I paid my price and paid a lot of fines and did my time and, thank God that’s behind me now,” she told Apter in another interview, this time in August 2021. “I don’t drink anymore, so we’re good. I’ve been sober for a while and I feel better than ever.”
Sytch isn't the only professional wrestler with a history of alcohol abuse — of rehab stints and multiple DUIs and so many headlines that their name skips past “cautionary tale” and lands at “punchline.”
There's Kurt Angle, one of the WWE's biggest stars of the 2000s, a legitimate gold medalist in wrestling at the 1996 Olympics. He’s pleaded no contest to four DUI charges in four states.
And there's Jeff Hardy, a former singles and tag team champion with the WWE who was arrested for a DUI in Florida in June, just eight miles from Sytch's crash site. He was charged with a felony DUI under Florida law, as the incident was his third DUI in 10 years, following two others in North Carolina in 2018 and 2019.
Hardy also pleaded guilty to drug possession and intent to distribute charges in 2009 after police found hundreds of prescription painkillers, cocaine and more than a half-liter of anabolic steroids in his North Carolina home.
In recent years, one of the company's young stars — Jonathan Fatu Jr., eight-time tag team champion with his identical twin, known as the Uso brothers — has been arrested five times for driving while under the influence in the last 11 years, including four times in Florida. Nearly every case has ended with a no contest plea. He was found not guilty in a 2019 case.
When Fatu was arrested on DUI charges in 2021, he continued to appear on weekly WWE television. Pundits speculated that he was too important to storylines to be fired. The Usos are real-life cousins to Roman Reigns, the company’s top champion for years, and appear as his villainous lackeys on television most weeks.
The WWE operates on a three-strike "wellness policy" with suspensions and eventual termination for both recreational drugs, cases of intoxication in the workplace and use of steroids. Though the company has never confirmed it, current and former wrestlers, including Sytch, have said the WWE paid or offered to pay for trips to rehabilitation centers.
It’s not clear when or if Sytch permanently relocated to Florida. She never received a Florida driver’s license and her address was still listed in Keansburg, New Jersey, by the time she was remanded into custody.
She kept her Facebook profile active, posting photos of sunrises and sunsets along the Florida coast and the occasional workout selfie with Pente. And her OnlyFans page, co-starring Pente in numerous videos, remained active.
But in January, she was arrested on charges of unlawful possession of a weapon and making terroristic threats in Keansburg. Police at the time said she threatened an unnamed victim, a domestic partner, with a pair of scissors. The victim dropped the charges in April.
“I am a WARRIOR!!!!!!,” she posted to Facebook three days later. With six exclamation points. “I will fight on!! #Taminator all day. Every day.”
Another one: “I don’t just survive. I thrive. I fight. I’m a warrior. Watch me next, bitch.”
On Feb. 24 in Keansburg, a motorist called 911 to report a vehicle had just struck a utility pole and kept on going. Body-worn and dashboard-mounted cameras from the incident show officers pulling up behind a white Nissan SUV. Their lights and siren flash, but the car doesn’t stop. It makes a quick right — nearly sideswiping a parked car — before another police car pulls up right to its rear bumper.
Officer Anthony Valle knows who’s driving before he even talks to her.
“Tammy, turn the car off,” one officer shouts, tapping on her window with his flashlight, shining the beam in her face.
“What’s going on, Tammy,” Valle asks. “What’s going on?”
When she says she doesn’t have her license on her, they tell her to step out of the car. She can’t answer when they ask where she came from, eventually settling on “my house.” She can’t answer when they ask where she was headed, just, “I’m trying to get out.”
A beat.
“I’m sorry. It was a bad idea.”
“Yeah, it was,” Valle responds. “Have you had anything to drink tonight?”
Whatever Sytch says next is unintelligible. Then: “I’m sober enough.”
“I don’t think so,” Valle replies.
They wait to arrest her until she fails the roadside tests.
Sytch was charged with careless driving and reckless driving and failure to wear a seatbelt and driving with a suspended or revoked driver’s license and driving without a license and failure to possess a driver’s license and failure to possess a car registration and failure to possess an insurance card and failure to install an alcohol interlock device and her eighth DUI charge in eight years.
Twenty-nine days later, she was heating up leftover burritos in the microwave at Pente’s house in Ormond Beach, Florida. She left in the white Mercedes she’d bought a few weeks earlier.
Sytch told the cops she remembered filling her car up with gasoline on West Granada Boulevard, a little less than a mile from the house.
Taylor couldn’t find any security camera footage of her at the Wawa. But he did find a video of her in the Mercedes in a parking lot shared by a Publix and a liquor store. It was even closer to the house.
The video showed Sytch in her Mercedes, parked. She never went into any of the stores in the shopping center but, every few minutes, she’d get out of the driver’s seat and go into the passenger’s seat and vice versa.
It was 7:51 p.m.
And then —
● ● ●
The light was green. At least for Joseph Havner and a few other cars on Wilmette Avenue, waiting to cross Route 1. He was the first witness.
The car in front of him pulled into the intersection but didn’t get far. The driver slammed on its brakes as a white Mercedes-Benz came flying through the intersection. Havner saw a woman behind the wheel, he told police.
Havner double-checked: He definitely had the green light. That Mercedes had blown through the red light.
Giuseppe Antonacci, the second witness, stepped out of his truck at Advanced Auto Parts on the side of Route 1. He took a glance out at the road, where he saw a white Mercedes flying toward the intersection with West Granada Boulevard.
He closed the door to his truck, looked up and watched the Mercedes slam into the back of a black Kia Sorrento.
Demetrios Mahairas, witness No. 3, was sitting in traffic in his GMC, waiting for the light to change on Route 1 with three passengers, witnesses No. 4 through No. 6.
They heard the crash before they felt it — a “very loud bang,” according to the woman in the front passenger seat.
Mahairas’s glasses and sandals flew off his feet from the impact. His left arm burned as the driver’s side airbag deployed.
One of the back-seat passengers was able to get out of the car. They were the front car of a three-car crash, with a white Mercedes in the back and a black Kia sandwiched in the middle. The witness approached the Mercedes, with a woman in the driver seat and a dog in the back.
The dog was fine. The driver was unconscious.
Antonacci left the Advanced Auto Parts parking lot and approached the Kia in the middle of the wreckage. The man behind the wheel took three or four shallow breaths. And then…nothing. He stopped breathing. Antonacci unbuckled the seat belt as the first police cruisers arrived on the scene.
Ormond Beach Police Detective Richard Taylor watched as fire crews pulled the blond woman out from behind the wheel of the Mercedes and the older man out from the Kia. He still wasn’t breathing.
The debris was everywhere, across the entire northbound side of Route 1 and spilling out behind and in front of the crash. In the middle was the black Kia. The rear window was shattered. Glass shards were everywhere.
Taylor began taking photographs — of the debris, of the damage to the vehicles. Of the bottle of Grey Goose, unsealed, on the floor of the passenger seat of the white Mercedes.
At 9:11 p.m., 31 minutes after he first got the call about a crash with severe injury, Taylor’s radio chirped. The driver of the Kia was dead. His name was Julian LaFrancis Lasseter, Jr.
Everyone called him “Fran,” his obituary noted.
He was 75 years old, an appraiser and a former high school teacher and a huge Florida Gators fan. He'd once given a Toastmasters speech titled "If You Ain't Laughin', You Ain't Livin'." He was a religious guy, always telling people he was "on God's plan."
The woman in the Mercedes didn’t have any identification on her.
Taylor looked behind the driver’s seat and saw a purse on the floorboard. He took a photograph, then pulled the bag out and sifted through it. Inside a wallet was a U.S. passport and a New Jersey identification card — not a driver’s license.
There she was, the blond woman.
Six miles away, she woke up in a hospital bed. Confused. In pain.
The police officer asked her name. Her address. About some kind of an accident — wait, she was in an accident? She couldn’t remember.
She had no idea what was going on.