Girl takes own life after alleged drunken driver kills sister, friends
By PEGGY O'HARE
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
Bennisha Davis, 14, of Humble, who shot herself to death last week because of grief over her 13-year-old sister and 2 best friends dying in a car crash caused by a drunken driver. Bennisha and her mother survived the wreck.
The devastation, which happened in an instant, was powerful — three 13-year-old girls killed by an alleged drunken driver who later fled the country.
Now the impact of that tragedy has widened with the suicide of a 14-year-old girl who survived the wreck.
Bennisha Davis was haunted by last month's deaths of her sister and two best friends in the northeast Houston crash. The 14-year-old Humble girl could not understand why she had survived while they had not.
The grief was apparently too much for the Ross Sterling Middle School student to bear. Davis fatally shot herself in the chest Thursday inside the family's home in the 15800 block of Marsh Hawk while her mother was at work.
Her sister, Detrihanna Davis, and her two best friends, Avianca Cortez and RaShaunda Raleigh, had died after suffering fatal injuries in the wreck.
"Bennisha took it real hard when she found out about it," said her grandmother, Diane Blakes of Houston. "It just did something to her, I guess — and we weren't really aware. Well, we knew she was hurting, but we didn't know she was hurting that bad."
Blakes said she later found a note Bennisha had typed on a computer which stated she missed her sister and friends and wondered why they had died when she survived. Her note also lamented that justice might never be served since the driver who caused the crash had fled the country.
That driver, Sajan Timalshina, 26, of Spring, ran a red light just before striking the teens' car around 1:30 a.m. July 9 as they were returning home from a "teen night" event at a nightclub on FM 1960, police said. He is wanted on three charges of intoxication manslaughter, but is believed to have fled to his home country of Nepal.
Houston police detained Timalshina after the wreck, but did not immediately arrest him because they wanted to gather more evidence. Officers mistakenly believed his claim that he drank only a quarter of a beer, something that toxicology tests eventually proved false, a police supervisor later revealed.
Timalshina's blood alcohol level at the time of the wreck was between .127 and .162. The legal limit is .08.
Timalshina, who had been in Houston on a foreign student visa, remains at large. The U.S. Justice Department would not comment Tuesday on the progress of their efforts to find him.
The U.S. has no formal extradition treaty with Nepal, but Timalshina could be caught if he ever travels to a country that does have an extradition treaty, said Capt. Bill Staney of the Houston Police Department's Vehicular Crimes Division.
U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee has publicly brought pressure on the U.S. Justice Department to bring Timalshina back to Houston. The Houston Democrat said the department could negotiate for Timalshina's return.
Though Davis was openly grieving, she never expressed a desire to harm herself or end her life, according to her grandmother and her mother, Chanel Blakes, 40, another survivor of the crash.
The girl's mother could not afford counseling, but Diane Blakes said the entire family needs it now. Davis' mother and brother are unable to stay at night in the Humble house where the girl died.
Blakes said if the police or the state had offered victims' services to the survivors of the crash and gotten Davis counseling, her granddaughter might still be alive.
Staney said his department did its best to provide the families with victims' services through the Texas Attorney General's Office.
"Everybody is so sad about this, particularly the officers who were on the scene and saw the carnage," he said.
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