Dad: ‘My son was a little angel’
No answers yet in LSD crash
Little Luka Bala loved to tell stories — and he’d been looking forward to the Air and Water show for days.
But the 6-year-old never got the chance to tell his dad, Branislav, about the jets he saw Saturday over Lake Michigan.
Luka and his mother, Marija Bala, 39, were both killed in a car accident as they drove home from the event around 6 p.m.
More than 24 hours after the fatal accident on the 4400 block of North Lake Shore Drive, police and the Bala family were still struggling Sunday to understand how Marija could have lost control and crossed over the substantial median that separates the northbound lanes she’d been driving on from the southbound lanes where she collided with oncoming traffic.
“I don’t know what happened,” Branislav Bala said as he was comforted by relatives at the family’s Rogers Park apartment.
Luka, his only child, and Marija, his wife of nine years, had gone to Navy Pier to watch the Air and Water show with friends, Branislav Bala said.
The family had moved to Chicago from New York three years ago, and Luka was days away from starting first grade at St. Sava Academy, a Serbian school near O’Hare, his father said.
A keen tennis player, Luka spoke fluent Serbian, like his parents, who emigrated from Serbia and Montenegro in the early 1990s, his family said.
He was a big fan of Serbian tennis star Novak Djokovic and would tell stories about professional tennis players to his entire family, his father said.
“My son was a little angel,” he added.
Marija worked for a real estate management company and “always had a smile on her face,” her husband said.
Chicago Police’s Major Accidents Investigation Unit had yet to establish a cause for the crash as of Sunday evening, police spokesman Veejay Zala said.
Two other people were critically hurt in the crash, according to authorities.
The accident shut down the southbound lanes of Lake Shore Drive between Hollywood and Wilson for several hours Saturday.