Six months after losing one of their own, a family has come forward to share their loss and warn others against the devastation that can come with drinking and driving.

Known to several as a hard-working family man, Lloyd Jason Reed was killed Oct. 2, 2018, in an accident on Zehner Road in Athens. A complaint filed by the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency said the driver was under the influence of alcohol at the time of the crash.

“Someone made the decision to get behind the wheel intoxicated and ripped a family apart,” said Patrisha Compton, Reed’s niece.

Compton described her uncle as a man who loved to chat his way through projects, usually helped by his “sidekick” of a youngest daughter, Mercedes. Leslie Reed, Jason’s wife of nearly 20 years, said everything he did had to be hands-on.

“Every single day, he’d have a list of things to do,” Leslie Reed said. “He’d mark them off, wake up the next day and make another list.”

That day in October, Jason was in the middle of remodeling a bathroom when he decided to make a trip to Lowe’s in Athens. He and Mercedes got into the 1978 Chevrolet El Camino that he had been restoring with his oldest daughter, and off they went.

He died on the way home.

Getting the call

“I was screaming,” Leslie Reed said. “Everybody in Walmart was trying to get to me.”

It was her nephew’s wife who broke the news through her own hysterics. Leslie said the call “was the worst thing I’ve ever had,” and she just kept begging for it not to be true.

“He’s never been in an accident,” she said. “He’d always been a safe person. Safety was his motto.”

The nephew and his wife were among the first to find the accident. By the time Leslie got there, the scene was already marked off, keeping her from Mercedes.

“They wouldn’t let me see him, wouldn’t let me see my daughter,” she said.

Mercedes was taken via MedFlight to Huntsville Hospital, where she spent the next week starting her healing process. The list of injuries included broken bones, a punctured lung, brain hemorrhaging and damage to her heart, face and knee.

The family believes she survived because Jason realized they were about to be hit by another vehicle and drove the car so that he would receive the impact.

“My uncle made sure to give his last breath, so she wouldn’t have to,” Compton said.

The day before Wednesday

Kimberly Wood, Jason’s older sister, said his death split her life in two.

“I say there’s a ‘before the wreck’ and ‘after the wreck.’ It’s like two different lives,” she said.

In the second life, much of the family avoids Zehner Road. Jason’s mother cries any time she has to go down the road, and Jason’s kids and wife avoid it entirely.

Tuesdays are also hard for the family. Jason died on a Tuesday, and in the two months that followed, his grandmother, his brother and two of his aunts also died. Three of them died on Tuesdays.

“We don’t think about Tuesdays anymore in our family,” Compton said.

However, they do their best to go on. To drown out the thoughts in her head, Wood has started sleeping with a TV on at night. Mercedes has frequent anxiety attacks and struggles, but Leslie said she has returned to school anyway.

“Today she called me and said, ‘Momma, I miss Daddy so bad, I wanna come home,'” Leslie said.

Education was important to Jason, who didn’t get one. Leslie said she often reminds Mercedes that even though Jason can’t be there to see her graduate or go to college in person, he’s still watching from heaven.

“Because of himself not having an education, he wanted to make sure all the nieces, nephews and children had educations,” Wood said. “And every one of them has. Every single one has graduated high school so far.”

Saying good-bye

Ted Stephens, who employed Jason for 12 years, remembered Jason as being “somewhat controllable, somewhat trainable … with a most irritating habit of being somewhat dependable” when he was first hired.

“But over the years, we watched the boy become a man,” Stephens wrote in an email Leslie shared with The News Courier. “… He was a man of honor, integrity and emotion that worked tirelessly to make a better life for his beloved family.”

Family members weren’t the only ones to benefit from those qualities. In fact, Jason’s job would take him all over the place, and when it was time to say good-bye, Compton said license plates from as far as New York appeared in the parking lot of the funeral home.

“There is an old saying we can embrace when holding the memory of such a good person close,” Stephens wrote. “‘The measure of one is not how much one loves, but how much one is loved by others.’ There has never been one to which these words more apply than Jason Reed.”

Remembering Jason

April 2, a Tuesday, marked six months since Jason’s death. Next week, the family will hold a candlelight vigil at Big Spring Park in Athens to mark the occasion.

The gathering begins at 8 p.m., with family members set to share their memories of Jason at 8:20 and a moment of silence at 8:24, the time he died.

It’s somewhat ironic, given Jason’s reputation as a talker.

“He loved to talk,” Leslie said. “You barely could get two words in with him talking. A 3- or 4-minute conversation between you and me would take him all day.”

That is, unless he was at the grill. His family jokes that no one was good enough at grilling in his eyes — save for Leslie with chicken — so Jason served as the grillmaster at family cookouts.

He wasn’t just known for food and chitchat, though. He also had a reputation for helping anyone who needed it.

“If you were broke down on the side of the road, he’d stop for you, even if he didn’t know you,” Wood said.

It was a helping personality that showed itself even when Jason was young, and not always in the brightest of ways. Wood said back when she was pregnant with Compton, she and then-11-year-old Jason were stuck in the house during a snowstorm.

Jason took it upon himself to drag Wood’s brand-new vacuum to the porch and vacuum the snow away, so Wood “wouldn’t slip and hurt the baby.”

When holidays came round, Jason was known for his love of Christmas lights. Compton said he could string the living room up so that the lights brightened in time with the sound of the TV — something he also tried to recreate in his car as a teenager.

“He couldn’t afford fancy lights, so he took Christmas lights and put them all in the top of the car, around the headlights, underneath it — the whole car was decked out in blinking Christmas lights,” Wood said.

She said a state trooper pulled him over and had him undo all his hard work.

And as an adult, she said he was known to a lady at the store near his work as the man who would come in on his lunch breaks to help lift heavy items and put them away.

“He did not sit still,” Leslie said.

It is that helpful, energetic, talkative spirit that the family will remember Wednesday, and they hope their remembrance will give someone else what it takes to not drink and drive.

“We’re not asking them to stop drinking,” Compton said. “I understand drinking. I get it. I’m asking to think about what you’re doing. … People’s ignorance about being intoxicated and what it could do to a family, it has to stop.”

About the accused

Scotty Dale Moss, 38, has been charged with felony reckless murder and felony DUI assault in connection with the wreck that killed Jason Reed. He was driving a GMC Envoy with a male passenger who was not injured in the wreck.

Records show Moss was out on bond at the time and awaiting trial on a charge of chemical endangerment of a minor. According to the crash report released by ALEA, Moss was headed home when he crossed the center line and collided head-on with the El Camino.

Moss told officers he drank a pint of Fireball before getting behind the wheel. He further admitted he had looked away from the road prior to the impact, which occurred less than half a mile from his residence. Troopers estimated his speed was 60 mph at the time of the crash, while Reed was obeying the 45-mph speed limit.

Moss remains in the Limestone County Jail. Limestone County District Attorney Brian Jones said Tuesday the case was awaiting presentation to a grand jury. Jones said Moss could be released on $75,000 bail after June 5.