It was late Saturday morning when Hilary Brooks took her 11-year-old daughter Mia out for a ride down Whitesville Road. The 36-year-old mother was driving her Kawasaki Ninja street bike with Mia holding on in the passenger seat behind her. They were local residents of Delmar, heading east through the quiet rural stretch of Sussex County just west of Robin Hood Road.
Around 11:30 a.m., traffic on the two-lane road was moving steadily. Ahead of Hilary’s motorcycle was a Dodge Dakota pickup truck. Further up in front of the Dodge, a large Ford F-650 rollback tow truck was also traveling east in the same lane.
Hilary decided to move around the traffic in front of her. She pulled the motorcycle out into the opposite lane to overtake the Dodge pickup. However, state troopers later noted that the stretch of pavement where she made the pass was clearly marked with double yellow lines as a no-passing zone.
As the motorcycle accelerated past the Dodge, the driver of the Ford flatbed truck up front began making a left turn into a private driveway. With the heavy truck turning across the lane, Hilary had no time or room to steer clear, and the bike slammed directly into the driver’s side of the flatbed.
The force of the collision threw both Hilary and Mia off the motorcycle onto the roadway. Emergency crews rushed to the scene shortly after witness calls started coming in to 911 dispatchers.
The impact proved fatal almost instantly for the young girl. Paramedics pronounced 11-year-old Mia dead right at the scene. First responders loaded Hilary into an ambulance and rushed her to a nearby hospital, but medical staff could not save her, and she died shortly after arrival.
The driver of the Ford F-650, identified by police as a 19-year-old man from nearby Laurel, was not injured in the crash. Police kept Whitesville Road shut down for about four hours while troopers gathered evidence and cleared the wreckage. The town of Delmar, located near the Maryland state line about 25 miles west of Rehoboth Beach, is now mourning the sudden loss of a mother and daughter.
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