“This one is really hard for me to look at, just knowing what comes next breaks my heart.”
Mom Samantha Jensen wrote this as she revisited a picture of her three-year-old daughter Scarlett who tragically died just five minutes after it was taken.
Heartbreaking picture of Samantha Jensen with her kids Henry, Molly, Rosie and a picture of her late daughter Scarlett (Instagram/samjensen44)
On October 7, 2022, at 4.52pm Jensen’s life changed forever – but a photo taken on her mom’s phone captured the chilling final moments of her daughter on the private driveway she and her brother were playing on.
The pair were being supervised by their grandma while the mom-of-four was out-of-town attending a friend’s wedding.
Scarlett and her two-year-old brother were on a walk to pick wildflowers with their grandma when the unthinkable happened.
Jensen, of Oldtown, Idaho, opened up about the raw ordeal to People. She told the publication: “That afternoon they went to get ice cream and enjoy a walk together.
“When they arrived home to our back driveway, Scarlett wanted to get out of the stroller to pick flowers. That’s when my mom took the last picture I have of her alive.”
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At 4.47pm, the toddler’s grandma took an adorable picture of the pair enjoying their surroundings on a dirt road, before a Chevy Tahoe came tearing through their private driveway, colliding with all three of them.
Detailing what happened in what was Scarlett’s tragic final moments, her mom explained to the publication: “My mother was waving her hands, screaming for him to stop and she tried to grab my children to move them out of the way but he was going too fast.
“Scarlett was killed almost instantly and my mom and Henry were critically injured.”
The mother recalled: “Henry was life-flighted to the children’s hospital where they found a fractured spine, six broken ribs, a broken jaw, a broken collarbone, a liver laceration and several other injuries.
Scarlett was tragically killed in a hit and run in North Idaho back in 2022 (Instagram/samjensen44)
“My mom had several broken bones but was able to be released from the hospital.”
She continued: “Henry spent a week in the PICU before he was stable enough to come home, and he had a full body brace on for 10 weeks.”
The man behind the wheel was 25-year-old Dakota LaFountain, who according to reports fled the scene on foot before he was eventually caught a few miles down the road from the crime scene.
A year and a half on from the incident, the Newport man was sentenced to 10 years in prison having pled guilty to vehicular manslaughter.