Family With Local Ties Dies After Fiery Crash In Phoenix

NORTH AUSTIN-PFLUGERVILLE, TX -- Pflugerville-based relatives of accident victims in Arizona are enduring unimaginable grief after the family matriarch and her four young sons were killed Wednesday night when the vehicle they were in plunged off a highway overpass.

Arizona Department of Public Safety officials said Durjuana Miller, 39, and four sons ranging in age from three months to eight years old were killed when she drove off an Interstate 10 overpass in Phoenix, according to several media reports there.

Details about the family began to emerge Thursday, the local connection confirmed by Miller’s surviving daughter living in Pflugerville via an agonizing Facebook post.

“Lord, why me?” Kendra Fresch of Pflugerville wrote Thursday after news of her mother’s death reached her. “My heart and my soul is gone. My love, my pride, my joy is all gone and never coming back.”

DPS officials are unsure what prompted Miller to drive off the roadway.

They said Miller was driving her SUV at a high rate of speed before it drove off the westbound HOV off-ramp, crashed through a concrete barrier, vaulted over a second barrier and crashed into a chain-link fence, according to a news report by Fox affiliate KSAZ in Phoenix.

Shortly afterwards, the vehicle fell 50 feet onto a dirt median and ignited into flames.

By late Thursday night, a KSAZ sister station in Austin, Fox 7 News, was able to confirm the family’s Pflugerville ties.

The Arizona Republic newspaper on Thursday reported that Miller, a mother of eight, had been visited by personal tragedy not long before the horrific traffic accident that claimed her life and that of her boys, ages 8, 6, 3 and 3 months.

The newspaper reported that Miller was on an extended stay in Phoenix to visit her mother while trying to emotionally recover from the loss of two other children in the past two years. One of Miller’s sons died in infancy and another succumbed to illness, according to relatives.