Maddalyn Dailey was a typical teenager just starting her senior year in high school. She enjoyed helping out at church, spending time with friends — and trying her father’s patience.
“She lived life to the fullest,” her father Dustin Dailey said. “Just testing every inch of my body.”
Maddalyn, 17, and her best friend were killed Friday when a pair of speeding vehicles cleaved their car in half at a Victorville intersection, authorities said. The California Highway Patrol is investigating whether the drivers who struck them were racing each other.
If authorities confirm a speed contest was to blame, the two girls would be the latest to fall victim to Southern California’s rampant and deadly street racing culture, which has claimed scores of lives in the last 20 years.
Authorities have not officially released the name of the second victim, but Maddalyn’s father identified her as Isabell Hill, 16.
The two girls, who had just started their senior year, were hanging out at Maddalyn’s house that evening when she left to drive Isabell home, promising to be back for dinner, Dailey said.
He heard the garage door shut, followed by the roar of a car exhaust. Then he heard the impact.
He rushed four houses down, to where Elmwood Drive meets Ridgecrest Road.
“I saw everything: the ball of fire from the other car that hit it, her car in pieces,” he said. “They were ejected from it, thrown clear down the road.”
A fire official told him the girls likely didn’t know what hit them, he said.
According to the CHP, Maddalyn’s Acura was struck by a yellow Chevrolet Camaro and a black Dodge Charger that sped into the intersection. The Camaro hit her first, causing major damage, followed by the Charger, which sustained minor damage, Officer Jebediah Wheeler, a CHP spokesman, wrote in an email.
Authorities arrested the driver of the Charger on suspicion of vehicular manslaughter with gross negligence, Wheeler wrote. The driver’s identity was not released.
The driver of the Charger ran from the scene, leaving behind a juvenile passenger who was later reunited with a parent, according to Wheeler. Authorities are still trying to locate that person.
A witness reported seeing the Camaro and Charger speeding before the crash, and investigators are gathering evidence to support the claim and determine it establishes the criminal elements of street racing, Wheeler wrote.
Ridgecrest Road has a dangerous reputation, Dailey said. The nearly two-mile-long road runs straight north and south along the western edge of the Spring Valley Lake community with few protected intersections.
The road’s history is so well known that Dailey routinely suggested to Maddalyn that she leave the neighborhood another way to avoid it.
“She’s usually pretty good about it,” he said, “because everybody that lives here knows that road is just a deathtrap.”
A dip on Ridgecrest Road south of Elmwood Drive can obscure vehicles from sight, Dailey said, likening pulling out into the intersection to “playing an old-school Frogger game.”
But perhaps the most pervasive problem is the speed at which people fly down the road, he said, recalling trucks racing each other and kids doing wheelies on dirt bikes.
Such complaints date back years. In 2021, the Victorville Police Department warned of the dangers of street racing in a news release after arresting two teens who were allegedly racing each other along Ridgecrest, with one driver reportedly reaching 95 mph before noticing the patrol unit.
The problem isn’t limited to street racing, Maddalyn’s father said. The high desert has seen a population explosion over the past few decades thanks to its relatively cheap housing compared to Los Angeles. Yet the road infrastructure remains largely unchanged from when he moved there more than 35 years ago, he said. A look back at Google Street View reveals the intersection where the girls were killed has gone unchanged since at least late 2007.
“It’s just so crowded and so overpopulated with the little tiny roads that we still have from 1990,” he said. “Everywhere you go, people are racing to get to the other side of town.”
When Dailey is able, he plans to petition for a traffic signal at the intersection, and potentially to have the stretch designated as a safety corridor subject to targeted enforcement and stepped-up fines. He’s not yet sure how to do that but is determined to learn.
In the meantime, he’s mourning both teens, whom he described as fun-loving and kind, with a lot of life left to live.
“Isabell was beautiful inside and out, sweet, funny, silly, smart, strong in her faith, and deeply loved by everyone fortunate enough to know her,” an online fundraising page for her family read. “She had big dreams, worked hard in school, loved her church, and brought so much joy to the people around her.”
Attempts to reach Isabell’s family and the GoFundMe organizer were unsuccessful.
Four days after the crash, the loss felt especially heavy, as an initial outpouring of support from friends, family and neighbors had subsided, Maddalyn’s father said.
He kept walking by his daughter’s room, wondering if he should keep the door open. He wanted to, but then he would see her dresser, her makeup, her jewelry. He’s watched movies about parents who have lost children and then kept their bedroom off-limits, preserved just as it was the day they died.
“Now I’m one of those parents that has one of those rooms,” he said in disbelief.
His daughter was compassionate and truly loved helping others, he said. After her death, he received a note from another teen who said she’d shown him kindness in a moment of darkness, which he credited with saving his life.
Maddalyn also tended to do what she wanted without fear of consequences, her father said. He recently learned that she’d scrawled a Bible verse — Proverbs 3:5-6 — in black Sharpie on the door of her bedroom at her mother’s house.
“Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding,” she’d written. “In all your ways acknowledge him and he will make your path straight.”
Her father plans to have the phrase tattooed on him this week.
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