Ka’Sheena Daniels’ mother wishes her daughter had never stopped to help.
The 31-year-old New Orleans woman, known to friends as “KK,” was killed on Interstate 10 last Wednesday when a secondary crash sent her off an elevated highway overpass. Daniels had pulled over to rescue her neighbor from an overturned vehicle on the roadway.
Daniels was traveling with her friend Franchon Williams when she spotted the flipped car and recognized the driver as her neighbor, Williams told Fox 8 Live. She rushed to pull the woman from the wreckage. Moments later, another vehicle slammed into one of the stationary cars near the rescue scene, knocking Daniels off the overpass to her death below.
Williams described the frantic search that followed in an emotional interview. “[We were] looking up under the cars, everywhere, and then they told me, ‘Well, y’all, somebody went over,'” she recalled. “They put their flashlight down there [and] it’s my friend. She’s just down there,” she said.
Daniels’ mother, O’Sheenana Daniels, raced to the crash site to assist authorities in locating her daughter, repeatedly calling out her name. She told local media that she heard her daughter cry out “Ma” in her final moments before succumbing to her injuries.
“It’s sad to say, but I wish she just never would have helped,” O’Sheenana Daniels said of her daughter’s fatal decision to stop. “I just wish she would have just kept on going about her business.”
The grieving mother’s words capture the crushing weight of a sacrifice made in seconds that will reverberate for years. Daniels leaves behind an adopted son, Noah, whom she had been raising as a single mother.
Daniels and Williams had been preparing to start paramedic school together this coming week, Williams said. The timing underscored how deeply the instinct to help others ran in Daniels’ character — a trait that would define both her aspirations and her final moments.
Friends established a GoFundMe page to cover funeral expenses for the slain mother. “Ka’Sheena died a hero. She put someone else’s life before her own, and her final moments reflected the kind of heart she carried throughout her life,” they wrote on the fundraising page.
The initial crash on I-10 drew multiple people to the scene to assist, and several of those good Samaritans sustained injuries when the second vehicle struck, according to police. The incident remains under investigation by New Orleans authorities.
Daniels’ death marks the second time in recent weeks that a motorist attempting to aid others at a crash scene has been killed in the region, though police have not publicly linked the cases.
New Orleans police continue to investigate the circumstances of the crash that claimed Daniels’ life, including how the second vehicle came to strike the stationary cars at the rescue scene.