SEP 25, 2022
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The crash shut down the overpass and traffic on I-85 South for most of the day, as crews cleared the wreckage and N.C. Department of Transportation officials assessed the damage. The overpass remains closed, but an NCDOT crew working on the bridge Saturday night said they expect it to reopen this week. McNeal was the only person thought to have died in the single-vehicle wreck until Tuesday, when Alyssa Taylor’s mother and sisters saw the news on social media while returning home from a trip to Florida, Alyssa’s aunt Lori Taylor told The News & Observer.
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Taylor was separated from her husband, family said, and previously worked at a Holiday Inn Express, according to her Facebook page. She was a full-time mother to their boys, 6 and 5 years old, Lori Taylor said.
The boys are now with their father, who shared custody, in Virginia, she said.
Taylor was getting help for a mental health issue, but “has never been one to run off,” Lori Taylor said. She lived with her mother, and they were in almost daily contact, she said. The boys were her whole world and have been asking for their mom, she said.
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Taylor’s Facebook page showed she was friends with McNeal, a truck driver who friends said worked for a Virginia trucking company. Martin could not confirm whom McNeal worked for but said the truck was owned by Greensboro-based VFS Leasing.
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Taylor’s family and friends provided The N&O with screenshots of Facebook messages and cell phone logs Friday that show Taylor texted her mother Krista Taylor, whom she lived with in Accomack County, Virginia, at 1:15 p.m. Sept. 13. In the message, Taylor said she was “riding with Danny in tractor trailer for two days.”
Text messages retrieved from McNeal’s Facebook account and posted on a friend’s Facebook page show Taylor contacted McNeal at 6:35 a.m. Sept. 13 to ask if she could join him on the run from Delaware to North Carolina. He agreed and told her he would be by that afternoon to pick her up. The N&O contacted the friend who posted the messages on her Facebook account, and she declined to comment.
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Screenshots provided to The N&O show he also missed a call from Taylor at 10:10 p.m.
People are saying the missed call from Taylor is proof that she was not in McNeal’s truck when he went to North Carolina, Lori Taylor said, but they haven’t heard from Taylor, whose phone is no longer in service, and her last post to Facebook was at 5:40 p.m. Sept. 13.
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“He could have went into the grocery store or stopped into the truck stop, and she wanted him to get something,” she said. “A phone call does not mean — it literally says in the messages, I’m pulling down the road to get you now.”
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But perhaps the biggest clue so far has been a singed, ash-encrusted pink blanket with teddy bears on it that Taylor’s family found Tuesday in the truck’s wreckage in Orange County. They stopped on their way home from Florida, Lori Taylor said.
“That’s the one thing my niece always traveled with was her pink blanket, and sure enough, that was the pink blanket that she saw there,” she said.
Taylor’s family returned to the wreckage Saturday morning with an Orange County Sheriff’s Office deputy and posted a video of the visit on Facebook. They found a dusty Old Navy flip-flop sandal under the wreckage that her mother Krista Taylor identified as her daughter’s size 8 shoe, the video shows. They wear the same size, she said.
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