HEALING AFTER TRAGEDY - My Family Was Gone in an Instant

ONE YEAR AGO LAUREN MUCKLEROY'S HUSBAND AND CHILDREN WERE KILLED BY A DRUNK DRIVER. SHE SURVIVED - AND FOUND NEW PURPOSE

- ABBY ROEDEL and EILEEN FINAN

Show of Support "I haven't felt alone in my grief," says Lauren (in Austin on Nov. 30, wearing a Team Muck bracelet in honor of the community response to her loss).

The day before Thanksgiving last year was hectic—Lauren Muckleroy remembers that much. The details are disjointed: a last-minute trip to the grocery store; a broccoli-rice casserole recipe she was testing out; her husband coming home from work tired; the stress of getting their two kids on the road for the family’s three-and-ahalf-hour trip from their Fort Worth home to her parents’. Then her memory blurs—until she heard the words she’ll never forget: “I remember a police officer telling me that all three of them were gone.”

On the evening of Nov. 22, 2023, her husband, Zach, 44, and their two children, Judson, 12, and Lindsay, 9, were killed in an instant when a Toyota Tacoma crossed into their lane on a Texas highway near Austin and hit them head-on. The driver, 25-year-old Connor McKim—whose blood alcohol count was just over three times the legal limit, according to a police report—died soon after. Lauren, 44, who was driving their Chevy Suburban and suffered broken bones in both arms, along with spine fractures and an intestinal tear, was the only survivor in their family. Even as her body began to recover, Muckleroy wondered if her heart could ever heal: “I remember thinking, ‘What is my life going to look like now? Where will all my love go?’”

'I thought, "Where will all my love go, now?"' - LAUREN MUCKLEROY