A desperate Ohio single mom died Thursday when she was thrown from the hood of her own car while trying to save her 6-year-old son during an attempted carjacking.
Alexa Stakely, 29, pounced onto the front of her Honda and wound up smashing her head on the pavement after two suspects attempted to take the car while her son, Deluca, was sleeping inside outside a babysitter’s home in Columbus.
“She’s always been a very special person to me and was always extremely wise and a very bright kid,” Stakely’s younger step brother Hayden Swartz told The Post Friday.
“She didn’t grow up under the best circumstances family-wise, but always made the most of every situation and had a very glass-half-full view of everything. She crushed every goal she made for herself.”
Stakely, a preschool teacher, had been picking up her son from his babysitter at an apartment complex at about 1:30 a.m. when the tragic incident occurred, cops said.
After putting the older boy in the car, she double-backed inside the house to grab something she had forgotten, police said.
When she returned, she saw the vehicle beginning to back from its parking space and realized a thief was stealing it with by the child inside.
She leaped onto the front of the car and was thrown from the vehicle as the crook tried to race away.
She slammed her head on the pavement and later died at Mount Carmel East hospital.
The thieves stopped the car nearby in the complex’s parking lot, hopped out and escaped over a fence.
Two men matching the same description as the suspects were caught on surveillance video, but remain at large.
Community members flooded the Columbus Division Police Facebook to mourn and call on the community to seek justice for her.
Stakely worked as a speech and language pathologist in Canal Westchester Schools. She was coming from her waitress shift, a second job she worked to help support her family, when she was picking up her son.
Swartz recalled one night when Stakely was in high school where she set aside her mountain of homework to help him study for an exam – showing she already had all the qualities of a good teacher before she even started on that path.
“She sat me down and was like ‘you’re gonna ace this test tomorrow’ and we studied for it all night,” Swartz said.
“She made a bunch of flash cards for me and she sat me down and we studied all night long.”
He said the family has gotten a large outpouring of support.
“We’ve had a lot of people reach out who knew her, whether they taught her kids or worked with her, everybody says the same thing, that her personality was so bubbly and that she had a positive impact on everyone,” Swartz said.
