More than 150 mourners gathered Saturday to remember the mother and her 11-year-old daughter tragically killed in a head-on crash with an allegedly drunk illegal immigrant driver.
Sobbing and weeping relatives and friends — many of them, donning shirts with images of Maria Pleitez and little Dayanara Cortes’ beaming faces — lined up outside the Lakewood Funeral Home in Howell to pay their respects at a somber wake.
At one point, a mourner who’d been crying uncontrollably leaned over the 42-year-old mother’s open casket, and repeated the phrases “¡Qué fuerte!” (“How terrible” in English) and “Porque?,” the Spanish word for “Why?,” over and over again.
Among those grieving the two devastating deaths was Dayanara’s father and her friend, also 11, who was injured in the July 26 crash and is recovering.
Pleitez was driving the two girls to a Wawa to get milkshakes at around 11:20 p.m. in Lakewood when Raul Luna-Perez, 43, slammed his Dodge Durango into the mom’s Nissan Sentra, according to local prosecutors.
She was killed instantly, and Dayanara, who was sitting in the front passenger seat, died soon after arriving at the hospital.
Luna-Perez was charged with two counts of vehicular homicide and assault by auto.
Charges could be added once prosecutors receive the results of an alcohol blood level test.
The Mexican immigrant, who was in the US illegally, had been arrested twice this spring for DUI in Red Bank, NJ — something Pleitez’s niece bemoaned at the wake.
Maria del Carmen Pleitez told The Post her aunt was a hardworking, cat-loving, doting US citizen who immigrated from El Salvador 24 years ago.
“She was a happy person,” Pleitez, 39, said. “She would come to a place, or she would come to our homes, and just bring happiness. She was never angry, never sad. She always had the strength to continue going, and that’s what hurts, because the guy had two DUIs already.”
Maria Pleitez spent years working in the painting department of Superior Promotional Bags, a Toms River promotional products supplier, the niece said.
“She was the head of the family,” Maria del Carmen Pleitez said. “She was bringing up her two daughters. She had her own apartment, her own place, and she never asked her help for anything. We loved her.”
Pleitez’s 16-year-old daughter, who stayed home, is heartbroken, she said.
“It’s so hard. We still feel like we can’t digest everything. Like, you wake up in the morning, you think it’s not true.”
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