Only three of Annette Rush’s eight siblings are left to remember her after she was killed last month when a car, allegedly driven by a 14-year-old, rammed into her Coweta County home.
It was a familiar, shattering grief that crashed down over her older sister Vivian Arnold when doctors said Rush, 56, had lost too much blood in the accident and they couldn’t save her.
“Everything just, it came all back — all that feeling, it came back over me again. When we lost our sister last year, when we lost our brother in ‘07 and our brother in 2019, all of that came back. All of that feeling and emotion, it just came back again,” Arnold said.
Three of their siblings died of health complications and another died at birth. But Rush “was just taken from us,” Arnold said.
“She just was going to bed that night, you know, to get up the next morning to go to Amazon (where she worked),” she said. “You just go to bed at night, you pray, you go to bed and you ask God to watch over you while you’re sleeping. And then all of a sudden you’re, you’re taken. You’re taken. We never saw anything like this coming.”
It was around 2 a.m. June 30 when the car came barreling through the home’s front, trapping Rush.
The 14-year-old driver was being pursued by a Coweta County sheriff’s deputy who tried to pull him over on Johnson Road near Ga. 54 for failing to dim his headlights, the sheriff’s office said at the time. In his bid to escape the traffic stop, the boy drove down Johnson Road allegedly reaching speeds over 130 mph.
Investigators believe the vehicle left the road, struck a guy wire, a fence and finally the home, completely destroying it. The crash left a large opening in what appeared to be the living room and a bedroom. A mattress could be seen from the outside poking through the rubble, and the porch deck and railing appeared to be unstable.
Credit: JOHN SPINK / AJC
Credit: JOHN SPINK / AJC
Just a few hours later, Arnold was getting ready for work when she thought she heard her phone ringing. It was her cousin telling her she needed to get to the hospital. She got another call shortly after; this time it was the hospital telling her to get there as soon as possible.
“I was really panicking then,” Arnold said.
Once at the hospital, the doctors gave her the news.
“They said they did all they could. It was too much blood that was lost in her body, so she just bled out. By that time, I just fell over in(to) the doctor, the nurse — I just fell over in her arm. I said, ‘What are you saying?’ Then she came out and just said it again. They said they lost her.”
Rush was a pillar in her community and very active in her church, her niece Veronica Carmichael said.
“She always made sure that she was there for every event to try to check up on people,” Carmichael said. “She was also a beautiful lady. Always very fashionable, big pretty smile. She’s been cute all her life.”
Credit: Family P
Credit: Family P
Carmichael had just seen her aunt a month earlier at a cousin’s wedding.
“She was so happy, and I remember dancing with her at the reception and cooking and laughing with her,” Carmichael said. “The last thing I did was I hugged both her and my mother before we got on the road and went home ... I’m just going to miss her.”
The day she died, friends and family gathered outside the house to console Rush’s husband, her high school sweetheart Andrico Rush, and one of her sons, 35-year-old Leonard Rush.
Credit: Natrice Miller
Credit: Natrice Miller
Andrico Rush received only minor injuries when the car came crashing through their home. Another son, 28-year-old Joshua Rush, who was paralyzed as a child, injured his shoulder and was treated at a hospital.
At 89 years old and already having buried four of her eight children, including one on her birthday last year, Rush’s mother Lucille Carmichael took the news stoically, Arnold said.
Her brother delivered the news, later telling Arnold, “He said, ‘Vivian, I got to admit. Our momma can hold stuff in real good.’ ... ‘We cried, we fell out, throwin’ mucous everywhere, and she just sits there. The first thing she said was, ‘Well, how is Josh doing?’”
Joshua Rush is paralyzed from the waist down, and his mother was his sole caregiver. The family now has to navigate making arrangements for his care as well as care for his father, as he also has health complications. They have set up a GoFundMe to help pay for funeral expenses, as well as care and housing for Joshua and Andrico Rush.
Annette Rush’s funeral is scheduled for 2 p.m. Saturday at St. Smyrna Baptist Church in Newnan.
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