Autopsy finds Va. truck driver killed in NC crash was drunk. Missing woman not found.
A Virginia truck driver was four times the legal limit for being impaired when he crashed his tractor-trailer rig into an Orange County bridge in September, according to an autopsy released Wednesday.
Danny McNeal, a 51-year-old driver with Moore’s Trucking in Virginia, was carrying a load of frozen chickens when his truck ran off the right shoulder of Interstate 85 early around 2:12 a.m. Sept. 14, veering toward a guardrail and back toward the highway before crashing into the N.C. 86 bridge, law enforcement and EMS records showed.
His truck flipped over, bursting into flames before it stopped on the right bank under the bridge. Troopers estimated that McNeal was going 65 mph — the legal speed limit — when he hit the bridge.
The family of Alyssa Taylor, 25, thinks she was in the truck when it crashed and also was killed, but the N.C. Highway Patrol has officially determined that only McNeal and his dog Blu were involved in the crash, Patrol spokesman Sgt. Christopher Knox has said.
A toxicology report released by the N.C. Medical Examiner’s Office on Wednesday afternoon showed McNeal had a blood-alcohol content of 0.32 — four times the state’s legal limit for impairment — when he crashed.
His official cause of death is listed as multiple blunt force injuries that he received in the crash, although 60% of his body was burned in the resulting fire, the autopsy states. His right hand was clutching a “red, metal bottle cap with no identifying markings,” it said.
The report also noted that McNeal was seen on video surveillance footage purchasing alcohol at a convenience store along his route that night, and that he was traveling with another person. However, only one set of human remains was identified at the scene and in the autopsy, it said.
Taylor’s family has continued to look for clues to her whereabouts, filing a missing person’s report with the Accomack County Sheriff’s Office in Virginia and traveling to Orange County in the weeks after the crash to look for clues at the scene, in the wreckage and at a landfill where the truck’s cargo and debris was buried.
A mother of two from Oak Hall, Virginia, texted her mother on Sept. 13 to say she was riding with McNeal on his run from Delaware to North Carolina and would be back in two days, her aunt Lori Taylor has said. But on Sept. 19, Taylor’s mother learned about McNeal’s crash while returning home from a trip to Florida.
Accomack County sheriff’s investigators have said that, based on the evidence they have collected, it does appear that Alyssa Taylor was in truck at least until it reached Henderson, about a 40-minute drive north of Hillsborough.
McNeal’s family declined to comment when contacted previously by The News & Observer.
