Frank Luna Santamaria.(Photo courtesy of Mar Luna. Click to enlarge.)
By BRIAN DONOHUE
Frankie Luna Santamaria wasn’t scheduled to work last Wednesday.
It was his day off from his job at Buona Sera restaurant, where a manager described him as “one of the family” on the tight knit kitchen crew. But he got a call in the morning from a colleague asking him to fill in and decided to help out.
The 20-year-old worked his shift as a grill chef and walked out the door just after 9 p.m. family members said, carrying his dinner in a plastic container and walking to the Herbert Street apartment he moved into with his cousins a month ago.
He never made it home.
(Photo courtesy of Mar Luna. Click to enlarge.)
Police say Denise Denk of Colts Neck was driving a 2004 Lexus south on Bridge Avenue when the car struck him near the intersection with Herbert Street.
Santamaria spent several days in intensive care at Jersey Shore University Medical Center in Neptune and died Monday, a week short of his 21st birthday.
His aunt, Marlen Luna, said doctors told family members he sustained severe brain injuries and had been on life support.
In the days before his death, Santamaria’s family had been scrambling to obtain a humanitarian visa from the US State Department for his mother Concepcion to travel from her home in Mexico to see him, she said. He died before the paperwork cleared.
“He was a mama’s boy,’’ Marlen Luna said in an interview Wednesday. “He loved his mother.”
He was living that love, his aunt said, regularly sending money home to his parents in Nealtican, a town in the Mexican state of Puebla which shares the same size population as Red Bank.
“He wanted to build a house because his parents don’t have a house,’’ his aunt said. “They had the land and they wanted to start building. His dream was to have a house for the family.”
The accident remains under investigation, pending toxicology reports, a vehicle inspection report and additional evidence, Red Bank police said.
Denk, the driver, “did not appear to be under the influence was very cooperative and consented to further testing and examination of electronic devices during the investigation,” Red Bank Police Captain Mike Frazee said in a press release.
Frankie Luna Santamaria was the only one of his parents’ three children who lived in the U.S, his aunt said.
He was born in Tennessee when his parents lived there for several years in the early 2000’s. When Frankie was three, the family returned to Mexico so his mother could care for an ill relative. His parents were unable to return to the US, prohibited by U.S. immigration laws.
But as a native-born US citizen, Frankie could go back to the U.S and work.
In his teens, he did just that, returning to live with his aunt in Asbury Park and attending Monmouth Regional High School before dropping out.
“It was hard because I am the aunt and I couldn’t push him to do it,” she said. “But he didn’t like school. He was trying to grow up too fast.”
He worked in landscaping and at a local golf course before finding a job at Buena Sera and moving to a house on Shrewsbury Avenue, where he lived before moving to Herbert Street in April.
A manager at Buena Sera said the staff there is “devastated.”
“This is just unimaginable,’’ said the manager, who identified himself by his first name of Mike.
The family has set up a GoFundeMe page to raise money to send his body to Mexico for a funeral and burial. On that page, family members describe him as a “teddy bear.”
Meanwhile, his aunt said the family is searching for answers as to how he could be struck down just a half block from his home.
Even so, Luna said other family members who live in Red Bank were not surprised, having witnessed other close calls involving pedestrians.
“Something is wrong there,’’ she said . “It needs to be fixed. We don’t want this to happen again to anybody.”
Pedestrian deaths have skyrocketed nationwide in recent years, with 2022 marking the highest total since 1981, according to a study by the Governors Highway Safety Association.
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