- December 13, 2025
A victim of the Feb. 10 crash on Palm Coast Parkway still doesn’t know where her car is.
Christa Santamaria-Koppell, 28, was the ninth vehicle listed by the Florida Highway Patrol in a media release about the crash that followed a high-speed chase at around 6 p.m. Feb. 10, through the middle of Palm Coast. Santamaria-Koppell was not injured, and she had her seat belt on, according to the report.
But that doesn’t tell the full story. First of all, she says, she is 27, not 28. After the incident, however, she might feel that a year has been added to her life.
It has been a bad stretch of luck for Santamaria-Koppell. She was rear-ended by a texting driver just six months ago, at a stoplight while visiting New York. Also in New York, in 2010, a truck came out of nowhere and rear-ended her at a stop sign. The truck followed her and continued to ram her bumper at every stop sign — about eight times in total. That driver was never caught.
Jacqueline Luckett, 34, of Jacksonville, was the perpetrator of the Feb. 10 crash, in Palm Coast. According to the FHP and reports from witnesses, Luckett entered Palm Coast off Interstate 95, tore through the downtown area and made a U-turn at Pine Lakes Parkway, eluding patrol cars. She reached speeds approaching 100 mph before slamming into a cluster of eight vehicles stopped at the light on Palm Coast Parkway, facing east across the Cypress Point/Boulder Rock intersection.
Just before Luckett entered the scene, Santamaria-Koppell’s Subaru hatchback was facing east, positioned at the white line in front of the crosswalk. She was waiting for the light, on her way home from work. She couldn’t see Luckett’s Dodge Charger in her rearview mirror because an SUV was blocking her vision. But she could hear it.
“I heard a long screech,” Santamaria-Koppell said. The next thing she knew, Santamaria-Koppell was in the intersection. Her Subaru had slid just beyond the crosswalk when she slammed on her brakes.
From there, she felt hazy. All she knew was that she wanted to get out of the car. She could see liquid running along the street behind her, and it smelled like gasoline. The ambulance came and someone asked her, “Are you injured?”
“I said, ‘I don’t know.’ So they said, ‘We’ll come right back,’” Santamaria-Koppell recalled. “I was so delirious, I was walking in circles.”
Santamaria-Koppell waited on a curb for about 45 minutes. Her mother, Janice Koppell, talked to her on the phone and said she would be right there. But when Koppell approached the scene, she was told Santamaria-Koppell was at the emergency room, instead. So Koppell drove to Florida Hospital Flagler and again called her daughter — but she was still sitting on the curb in the median, watching a helicopter arrive to pick up Luckett and transport her to the hospital.
Santamaria-Koppell said she wasn’t ever given a report or any other insurance information at the scene. “I felt like nobody knew I was there,” she said. She eventually was transported to the hospital.
Given the complexity of the scene, Florida Highway Patrol Lt. Justin Asbury said, it’s not uncommon for someone involved in a crash like the one on Feb. 10 to need to wait for an hour to be given the report.
The list of tasks for the officers is long: assist the injured; ensure there are no other threats to public safety, such as a down power wire, as a result of the crash; help arrange for the injured to be transported to safety; collect insurance information of all involved; verify whether seat belts were in use; recreate the scene, including which lanes were being traveled in by the vehicles and at what speeds; summon tow trucks.
“There is a lot of stuff to do in any crash, and when you add multiple vehicles, it adds up,” Asbury said.
He did say, though, that the report should have been given to Santamaria-Koppell. “It’s required to be given at the scene, and if it wasn’t, it should have been,” he acknowledged, adding that the FHP was the lead agency in the incident.
“It just bears witness to the craziness (of the incident),” he said. “Palm Coast isn’t used to that kind of stuff. It was kind of a learning experience for everybody.”
As a result, Santamaria-Koppell still doesn’t know where her car is. She was told it was going to be towed but not by which company.
In the meantime, she is now undergoing medical treatment for head, neck and back trauma.
“My doctor is worried about my neck, so I got checked out (Wednesday),” she said. “But it’s … going to take a while. It’s not moving. It feels like I’m already in a brace. … I have migraines, and when I try to move my eyes, I can’t follow things as well. He said it could be something that wears off.”
Santamaria-Koppell said that when she saw the helicopter taking Luckett away, her first thought was not very generous: “Really? We’re going to airlift her and treat her like a queen after all this?”
But after reflecting, she said: “We can learn from her that many different people are on the road and we need to be extra aware.”
