Easter crash trial | A portrait of lost loved ones

Though young, with personalities still emerging, they had several things in common.

They were both avid readers. They both had attended Christian academies. And, of course, they both loved the color pink.

Kayla was in the Mercedes that collided with Michael in the eastbound lanes before spinning into oncoming traffic in the westbound lanes. Morgan was in the westbound Volkswagen that crashed head-on into the Mercedes.

Morgan was belted in the backseat while her mother, Tracie Johnson, drove home from church. Morgan's father, Morris, and older brother, Morris III, drove in a separate car ahead.

Robert Carter, 39, was driving east with his wife of nine months, Delisia, 37, seated beside him.

Strapped in the center of the backseat was Kayla, Delisia’s daughter from her first marriage. Seated next to her, in a car seat, was her newborn half-brother, Ethan Carter.

It was Robert Carter’s first marriage. The marketing director at UPS had  met Delisia at a barbecue at his house in May 2008.

They were immediately smitten, and inseparable, said Delisia’s mother, Kathy Smith. Within a month, they were engaged. And on July 19, they were married.

“She wanted the sanctity of marriage,” Smith said. “He was waiting for the right person.”

Nine months later, on the afternoon of April 12, 2009, they were driving under a clear blue sky. Ethan was 2-months-old, and Delisia, a regional human resources manager for a logistics company, was celebrating her return from a weeklong work trip that had interrupted her maternity leave.

They were looking forward to an afternoon at Villa Christina, a  Dunwoody restaurant where they had reserved time with an Easter bunny. After that, they were planning to eat dinner at Smith’s house, where she was cooking pork chops, dirty rice and squash.

But Smith would not feed her family that night. She would never seem them again.

At approximately 1:35 p.m., the Carters’ Mercedes collided with the gold BMW sedan driven by Michael alongside them in the right lane, initiating a chain-reaction crash.

Across the median was Tracie Johnson, then 43. Morgan was in the backseat, with a seatbelt was strapped across her waist. An autopsy revealed that the shoulder portion of the belt was behind her torso at the moment of impact with the Mercedes. She was killed instantly.

In that moment, the world lost a quiet girl who was just learning to read chapter books and who had a budding interest in science.

Morgan loved pink, of course. Everything in her bedroom was either pink or a light shade of lavender. She had modeled children's clothing for department store ads. She also loved to play with babies.

But the first grader at Southwest Atlanta Christian Academy also had a serious side. She liked to read, was curious about science and had decided she was going to be a doctor.

"She said she wanted to help people," said Johnson, her mother.

The child was eager to inspect a model of a plastic heart her mother bought her for a school science project.

Morgan's older brother is the talker in the family. Morgan was comparatively shy, yet she had surprised her teacher recently when she presented her findings for another science project. Morgan and her mother had taken several carnations and left them in water saturated with food colors. Morgan calmly told her class how the flower stems drew the water up into the petals, which had changed color.

After school, when her mother picked her up, the teacher came running out of the building.

"She said, ‘Oh Mrs. Johnson, she was the best presenter we had,'" Tracie Johnson recalled, adding, "I knew she could do it."

Robert and Delisia Carter were fully belted at the time of the crash, but they too were killed instantly from the impact.

The medical examiner who conducted the autopsies on Kayla and Ethan said they were not killed instantly. Instead, they died in the heat of the explosion, after taking a breath or two of superheated hair.

When Smith, Delisia's mother, testified on Oct. 20, the opening day of the trial, she was so wrought with emotion that she struggled to spell her name for the jury. She cried throughout her testimony.

Later, in an interview, Smith described her family. She said Ethan was just beginning to recognize the sound of her voice. His eyes had started following her when she spoke. He was a happy baby, who drank his fill of milk and slept well.

“He hadn’t even gotten to cereal in his bottle yet,” she said. “He didn’t even get to hold a toy.”

Kayla was a reader, who liked the Bible and stories about animals. She’d been attending private Christian academies but had enrolled for the first time that semester in public school, as a 3rd grader. Smith said a private garden was built in her memory at the school, Stonewall Tell Elementary.

Smith saw her granddaughter all the time. They were neighbors by happenstance.

A mutual friend of Robert and Delisia's had invited Delisia to a barbecue at Robert’s house. He happened to have built a house five doors from Smith's home.

Robert proposed to Delisia at a restaurant the next month, and the month after that they were in St. Croix making vows. Soon after their marriage, they moved into Robert's house, and the plans were hatched for Kayla's summer break: she would spend it at her grandmother’s house down the street, with another of Smith’s granddaughter’s who would come from California.

Though she lived a short walk away, Kayla packed up her pink princess-themed suitcase, and wheeled it over.

Smith said her granddaughter loved her “unconditionally.”

“It didn’t matter what we did together, as long as we were together.”

Kayla would tell her grandmother secrets guarded by an oath sworn with a “diva pinky promise,” which involves a knotting of fingers.

Robert Carter wouldn’t allow pork in his house, so of course Smith cooked pork chops for Kayla frequently that summer.

They also went to the zoo, played trivia games and baked cakes, cookies and cupcakes together.

Smith, 57, was born and raised in California, and so was her daughter. Delisia Carter moved to Atlanta for a job, married her first husband and gave birth to Kayla at Northside Hospital.

Three years ago, Smith moved to Atlanta to be near them, and for that decision she is thankful. She got to meet her grandson after he, too, was born at Northside. And she got to know Kayla and to tighten the ties to her daughter.

"We were able to get close before they died," she said. "I had 3 1/2 years before they died, and I'm glad of that."