“I should be wearing a wedding dress right now, not mourning” laments the bride as her groom dies in an accident a day before the wedding

A groom-to-be died in a horrific wrong-way crash in Manhattan early Saturday morning, just one day before his wedding, leaving his bride devastated. The groom-to-be, Kirk Walker, and his cousin, Rob McLaurin, were killed by a wrong-way driver on the Henry Hudson Parkway in Harlem. On what should have been their wedding day Sunday, devastated bride-to-be Shauntea Weaver, 40, said, “I should be wearing my wedding dress right now, not grieving.” “I feel like this is a TV show and I’m going to wake up at any moment and go back to my real life,” she told the Post. “Every hour since this happened, I’ve had a different emotion come over me.” Walker, a 38-year-old father of three from Manhattan, was celebrating his bachelor party before his wedding to McLaurin, 40, when their Dodge Challenger was struck head-on about 2:20 a.m. by a pickup truck traveling the wrong way on the boulevard, according to police and a Facebook post. Both men died in the crash. Walker and Weaver were set to tie the knot in a grand ceremony at the Royal Manor wedding venue in Garfield, New Jersey, the disheartened bride said. A representative for the caterer confirmed the ceremony had been canceled due to “a hit-and-run accident.” “Our ceremony was supposed to be at 5 p.m. today, in a few hours,” Weaver said. “He passed away 24 hours before our wedding. It’s devastating, and not just for me. He has three children who loved him so much. They are heartbroken over the loss of their father.” “He was such a generous, hard-working man,” she continued. “He had a heart of gold and would do anything for anyone. A hard worker.” The couple had started a successful car rental business that thrived thanks to Walker’s incredible hard work, she added. “He put his blood, sweat and tears into it, we both did,” Weaver said. Now, it’s about getting justice for her late boyfriend. “The detectives looked me straight in the eye and said they would do everything they could to get justice,” she said. “They told me the driver left his DNA on the airbags. So they have that. Plus, the passenger is in the hospital with broken legs and needs to talk.” “Two lives were lost in a reckless car accident,” she continued. “They need to pay for killing two innocent people. Nothing is going to bring him back. But we’re looking for justice.” Walker’s neighbor, Tommy Lee, said Sunday that his friend was loved uniformly in the community. “He was family-oriented, helpful,” Lee said. “Smart. What an amazing guy.” Some people outside his apartment had not yet heard the news and lamented when they learned of his passing. Meanwhile, friends and family took to social media to mourn Walker’s passing. “At 5:30 in the morning I received the most heartbreaking call that two of my cousins ​​died in a car accident,” Akilañ Ke-Ki Woods wrote on Facebook. “He would have been getting married today! How does our family go from planning a party to planning two funerals?” she continued. “His fiancée, I can’t imagine her grief right now. Both cousins ​​had children, both parents and siblings!” “My family is hurt and broken right now,” she added. “I can’t go an hour without bursting into tears.” Another woman, Alexis Stewart, identified Walker on Facebook as a “neighborhood nephew to all the friends in the neighborhood” and noted that her cousin died next to him. The driver of the pickup ran away after the crash, as did the passenger, and remains at large. But officers caught up with the passenger about 30 feet from the crash, officers said. Authorities took that person to the hospital. It’s unclear whether they were arrested or charged with any crime.