SHE DIED SAVING HER BABY
Jumps in front of stroller instant before raging driver rams family
As the white car with its Texas plates hurtled toward her family, hero mom Melissa DeLoatch did not hesitate.
The pregnant mother surrendered her life to save her husband and six kids, leaping in front of a road-raging driver poised to plow into the helpless DeLoatch clan outside a Rockland County 7-Eleven.
“My sister saw him coming at the last second and threw her body in front of the stroller and pushed the kids away,” her brother James Christopher, 28, told the Daily News after speaking Thursday with authorities and the children.
“The kids … they had to see their mom get run over, then run over again,” continued Christopher. “He drove over her, reversed and drove (over her) again.”
A mangled baby carriage remained outside the store, its tiny occupant spared by the sacrifice of the martyred mother.
The horrifying Wednesday afternoon attack, with the eight DeLoatch family members trapped helplessly on the Haverstraw store’s sidewalk, began after dad Shawn, 35, asked Jason Mendez to put out his cigarette.
Two of the DeLoatch kids suffer from health woes exacerbated by secondhand smoke, according to a family friend — but the request sent Mendez, 35, into a murderous rage.
The Washingtonville, Orange County, man jumped behind the wheel, pinned the accelerator to the floor and slammed his Infiniti into the family at such a high rate of speed that the vehicle smashed through the front wall of the shop, cops said.
The deranged driver backed his luxury car up 20 feet before ramming into Melissa for a second time as her terrified kids looked on. Plywood covered the left front of the store Thursday where the speeding vehicle tore a hole in the building front.
Melissa, 32, who delivered a baby with sickle cell anemia last year, died just two days after learning she was carrying her seventh child — leaving the rest of her brood without a mother. The kids range in age from the 10-month-old baby to age 10.
“Melissa did what any mother would have done and tried to protect her children,” said the victim’s cousin Adrienne RodriAugust guez. “She was a true hero. Melissa was full of love, smiles, life and so much more. All of us are going to miss you beyond (what) words can explain.”
Mendez was charged with murder, attempted murder, menacing, weapons possession and resisting arrest in the grotesque attack. He remained behind bars at the Rockland County Correctional Center after cops used a Taser to arrest the crazed, razor-wielding suspect.
His Texas rap sheet included a prior road-rage incident in 2014, where cops said a drunken Mendez was busted for obstructing a San Antonio highway with his car. He paid an $850 fine to settle the case.
He was also arrested for assaulting a public servant in 2012, paying a $1,500 fine, and for assaulting his wife in 2013 — a case that was dismissed when a witness failed to appear.
A former neighbor of the DeLoatch family said father Shawn was fanatical about raising his kids in a smoke-free environment. One of the children had asthma, and a second struggled with an unspecified but serious health issue, the Newburgh woman told The News.
“You couldn’t smoke around his kids,” the woman said. “He didn’t have any of that. If he had to smoke a cigarette, he would go outside …. He didn’t play that.
“When it came to his kids, that man was crazy. But it was a good crazy, because he cared.”
Three of the injured children remained hospitalized Thursday for non-life-threatening injuries at Westchester Medical Center, with their father posting on Facebook that the kids were “doing great up here.” The other three children were recovering surrounded by family members — but not their mother, said Christopher.
“They’re a little bit (rattled), but they’re OK,” he said. “They’re around the ones they know and they know their mother loved them with all her heart.”
Cops arrived at the store parking lot Wednesday to find Mendez still inside his car with its Texas plates. He finally got out while clutching the blade, and refused multiple orders to drop the weapon before officers zapped him with the Taser.
In contrast with the man accused in her death, Melissa “was a loving mother, a hero, a perfect sister,” said Christopher. “She was a hero to her kids for saving their lives. They say she is their hero.”
Her death came four years after her drunken-driving brother, an NYPD officer stationed in the Bronx, died in a head-on crash where he was heading the wrong way on the New York State Thruway.
Shawn DeLoatch, in a series of Facebook posts, asked for prayers while struggling with the sudden, shocking death of his wife.
“We said i do,” he posted Thursday afternoon along with a half-dozen photos of the couple. “(Why) u leave me come home to ur husband and 6 kids baby please i need u i love n miss u.”