Port Angeles: Father forges ahead after losing family

PORT ANGELES — Jeff Smith carries his wife’s gold wedding band in his wallet, along with photos of his three children taken weeks before they were killed.

He looks at the photos every day and wonders whom to grieve for.

“When you lose all of them at the same time, who do you focus on?” he said Saturday.

Smith’s wife, Sara, 26, and their three children — 3-year-old Samantha, 2-year-old Nathan and 3-month-old Robert — were killed Jan. 13, 2000, when their car crossed the center line on state Highway 112 near Dan Kelly Road, hit a logging truck, flipped over and caught on fire.

The Smiths were living in Joyce at the time.

On Friday, almost four years after their deaths, a Clallam County Superior Court jury delivered a $1.3 million verdict in a wrongful death suit, determining the state negligent and mostly at fault for the Smiths’ deaths.

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The rest of the story appears in the Sunday Peninsula Daily News.

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