Mom who survived crash that killed her daughter speaks out

SOUTH HOUSTON, Texas (FOX 26) - The mother who survived a deadly crash that killed her daughter spoke exclusively to FOX 26. 

Police say the fatal crash on Sunday was caused by a teenager who was driving drunk. That teen, 19-year-old Erick Hernandez, is now out of jail on bond.

The mom who was in the car sitting next to her daughter when she was killed says this is almost too much to bare because she has actually suffered the loss of a daughter before. 

“I’m just hurt,” cries Carmen Rainer.  The mother in mourning says she, her daughters and her 1-year-old grandson had just returned from a trip to Louisiana.  Rainer's youngest daughter Taylor Phillips was driving and dropped off her two sisters.  Then, less than five minutes from the home she shared with her mother and her baby, it happened.

“She said 'ah' and it just, these two big bright lights and a gray truck and it hit us." Rainer says. 

Surveillance video captured the fatal crash that killed Rainer's 23-year-old daughter.  Rainer was knocked unconscious, “but the baby woke me up because he was crying."

Mason's car seat is normally behind his mother, an area of the SUV destroyed in the crash.  The one-year-old was only seated in the middle because others had been with them. 

After the gray pickup truck smashed head on into them, Rainer saw smoke.  “I wanted to get him out first, but he was stuck under her.”

Then she realized her daughter was dead.  “All of this, all this,” Rainer demonstrates running her hand from the top middle of her head, under her eye and across her cheek.  “I looked at my daughter and all this was gone.” 

Rainer, recently released from the hospital, is left bruised and in pain, mostly in her heart.

“Shhh, shhh,” she comforts her crying grandson, who’s been asking for his mother.

Investigators say this family's pain is because 19-year-old Erick Hernandez was driving drunk, veered across more than three lanes of traffic and crashed head on into them less than a mile from the bar where they say he was drinking, Frontera Events Venue on Houston Boulevard in South Houston.  Hernandez is charged with Intoxication Manslaughter.

“I want him to be prosecuted to the fullest," Rainer says.

TABC is investigating Frontera to see if anyone from the bar is also responsible.

“They need to be punished as well,” cries Rainer, who in 2013 lost her daughter Tyre who was shot to death.  Now her baby girl Taylor is gone. “We haven't even recovered from my first daughter's death.”

Taylor is said to have loved life, doing hair and most of all being a mom. 

“He needs his mom. He don't have her anymore,” Rainer says as her grandson climbs into her lap. 

Frontera has had a permit to serve alcohol since October 2017.  In that time, the bar has had two violations with TABC -- one in February 2018 for giving alcohol to a minor and another in May 2018 for serving alcohol during prohibited hours.