Five children, two parents.
Gone.
Torn from this life in moments. No warnings. No time for goodbyes.
The past several days have been an unfathomably sad experience for two Lake County families.
Wilfredo "Willie" Malave, 41, and his three children died Jan. 18 when Malave sped off the roadway from a curve in a remote area of south Lake, slamming into trees and a utility pole.
The children were Zion, 9, described by friends as an "old soul"; 7-year-old Phoenix, who was crazy about his mom; and little Avaya, 2, who was still strapped into a car seat and clung tenaciously to life until she reached the hospital.
The wreck took Christina Marie Schultz Malave's entire family. Christina, 31, was in Tavares with her family, which owns G.W. Schultz Tool Inc. on County Road 448.
Tragedy struck a second Lake County family three days later.
The former children's pastor at Bay Street Baptist Church in Eustis was driving her two girls along a stretch of Interstate 75 known as Alligator Alley in South Florida when she clipped the back of a box truck in fog and lost control.
The car driven by 33-year-old Cecilia Douglas, a manager at the Ann Taylor Factory Store in Sunrise, somehow missed the spring-loaded cables of a $4.2 million barrier system designed to stop cars on impact. Instead, the 2005 Lexus tore through a fence designed to keep wildlife off the highway, flipped over and landed in a canal.
A passerby on a cell phone gave a running account as the car containing Cecilia and her girls, Rylee, 3, and 4-year-old Madison, listed to one side and sank in 30 feet of water, everyone still belted in.
"It blows my mind that there was no good Samaritan," said Lake County Chief Deputy Peyton Grinnell, a friend of the Douglas family. "Nobody jumped in."
But then, Grinnell curbed himself: "I shouldn't say that. I wasn't there."
Leave it to Peyton to say what others don't dare express but are thinking all the same. Embedded in his comment is the single unanswerable question: Why?
Why did it happen in the first place? Why didn't someone save them? Why take the life of a woman who by all accounts was a "godsend" to others, living with arms wide open to her family and her community?
"She never met a stranger," said Jill Santos, 30, a college friend who moved from Greenville, S.C., after falling in love with Lake County when she came here for Cecilia's marriage in 2006 to Nathan Douglas, a Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission officer.
"She had one of those personalities — if she wanted to meet you, she'd walk up and talk to you. And she would keep on until you were her friend. You couldn't deny her."
Jill, Cecilia and Nathan, who all met at North Greenville University, a Southern Baptist school in South Carolina, made Lake County their home and began sinking roots into its sandy soil. Jill, the recreation coordinator for Mount Dora, married and the couple now has a daughter. She attributes much of her happiness to Cecilia's friendship and guidance.
Nathan's father, Mark Douglas, a court deputy for the Lake Sheriff's Office, previously pastored the Bay Street Baptist Church and served as chaplain for the Sheriff's Office, offering comfort to those in situations similar to the one in which he now finds himself.
Nathan was working at Harden-Pauli Funeral Home when he got a chance to fulfill his dream of becoming a law-enforcement officer. After he graduated from the police academy, the wildlife agency snapped him up.
