Monica Daniele Jackson, 49, a female, died in the early hours of July 11, 2019, when an ordinary overnight drive turned into a sudden, violent catastrophe on Interstate 22 near Jasper, Alabama. She was behind the wheel of a Nissan Altima, traveling eastbound with three passengers, when headlights appeared where they never should have—coming straight at them in the same lane.
Investigators said the crash happened around 1:50 a.m. at about mile marker 61, roughly a mile south of Jasper. A Dodge Ram pickup was moving westbound in the eastbound lanes, and the impact with the Altima was head-on. The force of it ended the lives of everyone inside the Altima at the scene: Monica Daniele Jackson, Tamblyn J. Jackson, Kheri Thomas Ayers, and Daniel Izell Johnson, all from Little Rock, Arkansas. In the first statements released after the wreck, troopers described it as a wrong-way-driving incident, the kind that leaves almost no time to react and no room to escape.
Family and friends in Arkansas were left trying to make sense of how a trip could vanish in an instant. Relatives told reporters the group had been headed to a family reunion in Orlando, a long drive with an early start that was supposed to end with embraces and photographs, not phone calls and unanswered questions. The Walker County coroner indicated that some of those killed were related, though officials did not publicly map out the family ties in detail.
The driver of the pickup, identified as Michael Tory Majors of Bessemer, Alabama, survived the collision with injuries and was taken to Walker Baptist Medical Center in Jasper. After his release from medical care, authorities said he was arrested on July 12, 2019, and booked into the Walker County Jail. Alabama authorities announced that Majors faced four counts of manslaughter tied to the four deaths, naming him as the suspect driver whose alleged wrong-way travel set the tragedy in motion.
Public court records later showed the case continuing long after the wreckage was cleared from I-22: filings referenced Walker Circuit Court case number CC-20-900031 and an appeal in the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals under CR-2023-0228. The Alabama Supreme Court’s docket reflects that Majors sought further review, but on April 12, 2024, the court denied the petition for a writ of certiorari, leaving the lower court’s ruling in place without issuing an opinion.
