Author: Nicholas Allbright

Update: The story was updated at 2:55 p.m. Sept. 28, 2022.

The investigation into a fatal tractor-trailer crash in Orange County is finished, but the mystery surrounding a Virginia woman who may have been a passenger in the truck remains.

A sheriff’s investigator in Virginia said he thinks 25-year-old Alyssa Taylor was killed in the Sept. 14 crash on Interstate 85 at the N.C. 86 overpass in Hillsborough.

The N.C. Highway Patrol’s official determination is that only truck driver Danny McNeal and his dog Blu were killed, Patrol spokesman Sgt. Christopher Knox said. However, the Patrol continued the search Wednesday at the Sampson County landfill, where debris from the wreck was taken, after repeated requests from the missing woman’s family and friends.

The Highway Patrol will send an update if anything is found, Knox said in an email.

Taylor, a mother of two from Oak Hall, Virginia, texted her mother on Sept. 13 to say she was riding with her friend McNeal on his run from Delaware to North Carolina and would be back in two days, her aunt Lori Taylor has said. But on Sept. 19, Taylor’s mother learned about McNeal’s crash while returning home from a trip to Florida.

The family contacted authorities and launched a search, stopping on the way home to inspect the truck’s wreckage in Orange County. They returned Friday to spend several days looking for more clues and talking with emergency crews who responded to the wreck.

On Tuesday, they met with the Highway Patrol to get an update and seek a more extensive investigation. The family asked Patrol officials to check the landfill, Lori Taylor told The News & Observer on Tuesday night. They were told that the family could do that, but the Patrol would not be involved, she said.

“He said that wasn’t an option,” Lori Taylor said.

Knox said the Highway Patrol continues to work with the Accomack County Sheriff’s Office in Virginia, which is looking into Taylor’s disappearance. The Patrol investigates crashes, he said, but not criminal or missing persons cases.

Patrol officials are “confident that even with the complexity of an overturned commercial motor vehicle/post-crash fire, a thorough search was made,” Knox said in an email Tuesday.

“Additional follow-up efforts have also been taken to further investigate the initial number of occupants that were believed to be in the vehicle,” he said. “I am of the understanding that information has been shared with our agency as well as us having shared information with authorities in Virginia in hopes of furthering the simultaneous investigations.”

Crash ends in ‘massive fire,’ explosions

McNeal, a driver with Moore’s Trucking in Virginia, was carrying a load of frozen chickens when his truck ran off the right shoulder of Interstate 85, veering toward a guardrail around 2:12 a.m., Highway Patrol and Orange County Emergency Medical Services records showed.

McNeal used the brakes at least 509 feet before crashing into the bridge and tried to steer the truck back onto the highway, according to a Highway Patrol report obtained by The N&O. The 2022 Mack truck then hit a highway sign with its trailer and flipped over, bursting into flames, records showed.

The truck traveled 85 feet after impact, stopping on the right bank under the bridge, Patrol and EMS reports stated. Troopers estimated that McNeal was going 65 mph — the legal speed limit — when he hit the bridge, sending up a massive fire. Periodic explosions were reported up to six minutes after he crashed, EMS reports showed. The top of the trailer was already gone when firefighters arrived.

The fire was “knocked down” by 2:35 a.m., but the cab continued to burn until 2:54 a.m., EMS records showed. The crash shut down the highway for most of the day; the N.C. 86 bridge reopened Sunday after being repaired.

What happened to Taylor is now up to the Accomack County Sheriff’s Office to determine, Knox told The N&O earlier Tuesday. The Highway Patrol does not think she was on the truck, and has not reached out to the State Bureau of Investigation or local law enforcement, he said.

“I want everybody to understand our role in this as a law enforcement agency,” Knox said. “We are a Highway Patrol, and while we are working with anybody we can work with to help find this young lady, our part of the investigation is related to the collision.”

“What happened at that collision scene is what we do as an agency. We talk to everybody we can talk to to help understand the collision, and we’re more than willing going forward to help investigators or the family or anybody, but that falls outside what we do,” he said. “As people and as human beings, we are right here with everybody, empathizing and really wanting to find where she is.”

Exhausted leads, family has hope

Accomack County investigators have only been in contact with the N.C. Highway Patrol, and they are out of leads at this point, Lt. Joshua Marsh told The N&O in a separate phone interview Tuesday.

They reviewed body camera footage captured by an Exmore police officer before McNeal left town Sept. 13. The officer stopped to warn McNeal about parking his rig in the road and briefly spoke with an unidentified woman in the truck. The video did not capture a clear picture of her, but the family identified her voice as belonging to Taylor, Exmore Police Chief Angelo DiMartino told The N&O.

Investigators also confirmed Taylor’s cell phone and the GPS tracker in McNeal’s truck pinged in the same location near Oak Hall, Virginia, where she told McNeal to pick her up, and again near Henderson, North Carolina, about an hour before the crash, Marsh said. Her cell phone has been out of service since the crash.

The truck’s GPS tracker, which pings every five minutes, showed McNeal only stopped in Royal Farms, Virginia, about an hour south of Exmore, Marsh said. Video footage retrieved from a camera there showed McNeal briefly exiting the vehicle. A second camera located in a toll booth at the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel showed him alone in the cab, heading south.

“We were unable to determine through any kind of visualization that Ms. Taylor was 100{c024931d10daf6b71b41321fa9ba9cd89123fb34a4039ac9f079a256e3c1e6e8} present inside the cab,” he said.

However, he does not believe Taylor is alive, he said, given the personal belongings that the family has found in the truck and the fact that McNeal did not stop once he crossed the North Carolina line.

“You can see the pings are consistent as traveling, you don’t see him stop anywhere for any period of time, other than that there was a stop light or something of that nature,” Marsh said. “You don’t see him stop anywhere where we believe that there was anything that could have been construed as criminal activity that may have occurred against her.”

The N&O reached out Tuesday to the North Carolina governor’s office and the N.C. State Bureau of Investigation about the case.

An SBI spokesperson told The N&O in an email Wednesday morning that the agency does not have “jurisdiction to investigate as we generally need a request from a local sheriff, chief or district attorney in order to conduct an investigation.”

“With that said, we have reached out to the investigating agencies and are here to offer any resources should they need our assistance,” SBI spokeswoman Anjanette Grube said. On Wednesday afternoon, Grube sent another email saying that the SBI has contacted the Accomack County Sheriff’s Office.

Taylor’s family met with the Orange County Sheriff’s Office last week, Lori Taylor said, but Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman Alicia Stemper said in an email Wednesday that the department doesn’t have any authority to investigate independently.

“The NCSHP is always the lead agency in crashes that occur on the Interstate and on state-maintained highways; missing person’s reports always begin where the person was last known to be,” Stemper said. “They proceed outward from there with the investigating agency directing and coordinating the search. In both types of investigations, we assist when asked, but it would be inappropriate and counterproductive for us to self-deploy.”

Taylor’s family hasn’t waited for law enforcement to investigate, Lori Taylor said Tuesday night. They’ve uncovered most of the clues so far, and their next step was searching Wednesday through debris at the landfill, which covers dozens of acres, she said.

The family learned that the Highway Patrol was already in Sampson County when they arrived at the landfill Wednesday morning.

They’re not going to stop looking, Lori Taylor said. She noted the renewed hope they felt Monday night when a song about “a rainbow being at the end” came on the radio while they were in the pool at their hotel.

“It was almost like chills just shot through all of us, all at once,” Lori Taylor said. “It was like we all just stopped talking and were listening to the song, and I just knew that was her telling me to keep pushing. That there’s something at the end of this rainbow; we gotta just keep pushing, gotta keep pushing.”

This story was originally published September 28, 2022 11:32 AM.