Belinda's Final Journey

By RAY REYES The Tampa Tribune

Published: Mar 30, 2007

LAKE PARK, Ga. - She spent most of her life in transit, and the impulse to see faraway vistas steered her to this truck stop off Exit 2, a way point between states on a map and states that existed in her mind.

Between Florida and Georgia.

Between her home in Plant City and her desire for the open road.

Between somewhere and nowhere.

This suited Belinda Cartwright, who seemed at ease in the places between here and there.

Places such as Exit 2 and the TA Travel Center of America just east of Interstate 75, a roadside diversion between Bellville, Fla., and Lake Park, Ga. Cartwright was here six years ago, when she hitched a ride with a trucker.

Her wanderlust ended with a cardboard coffin and a pauper’s grave. She was laid to rest under her own name, but through a series of blunders by law enforcement, her anguished family was not certain of her fate until December.

What the family members learned then only prolonged their struggle for closure.

One Last Ride

In the hours between the comings and goings of her final day, Cartwright and the trucker shared a seemingly normal time together. They ate meals in the travel center’s food court. She washed clothes using the truck stop’s coin-operated machines, then napped in his rig.

When she was awake, people saw her reading a Bible. Pressed between the pages were photographs of her sons, Joey and Matthew. These were the possessions she always took on her travels, along with the change of clothes and the Florida identification card she kept in a plastic garbage bag in the trucker’s rig, her family says.

Hours later, shortly after 1 a.m. Feb. 22, 2001, her ID was not with her, initially making it difficult for authorities to place a name on what was left of her. Witnesses told Georgia State Patrol troopers that the woman, whose body lay mangled near the travel center’s entrance, was run over by the trucker she arrived with that afternoon.

The flatbed semi did not stop and merged onto southbound I-75. The driver has not been identified or found.

His passenger was a Jane Doe for about eight hours. Her fingerprints unlocked arrest records in Hillsborough County. The records gave authorities her name — Belinda Gail Cartwright, 36 — and an old addresses in Plant City and Seffner.

For reasons still unclear, news of Cartwright’s death took a year to reach her brothers and sisters in Florida. They did not know where, when or how she died for five more years.

“The family went hysterical because law enforcement was supposed to tell us,” said Cynthia Rogers, 28, Cartwright’s half sister.

For nearly six years, Cartwright, a single mother of two, who never held a steady job and struggled with paranoid schizophrenia for much of her life, slipped between the cracks of mainstream society, even in death.

News Came Through Web Site

Unaware of what had happened to her sister, Rogers filed a missing persons report with the Plant City Police Department in late summer 2001. During that time, three law enforcement agencies — the Georgia State Patrol, the Lowndes County Sheriff’s Office in Valdosta and the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office — had Cartwright’s full name, but none contacted her relatives. No agency put forth much effort to find them, family members said.

Rogers told Plant City detectives her sister last was seen in Plant City on Feb. 1, 2001. Rogers’ husband, Danny, had taken Cartwright to get a new ID card before she left Florida again. Cartwright told him she planned to go to an old truck stop off State Road 39 so she could hitch a ride out of town.

It was typical of Cartwright. She came from a family of truckers and trusted their kind, said Lorisa Cartwright-Calloway, 44, Cartwright’s oldest sister, who lives in Branford.

Cartwright’s paranoid schizophrenia may have triggered her restlessness. As a child, she was well-behaved and quiet but was a loner who felt people were “always looking at her and talking about her,” said foster parents Jay and Phyllis Moran, who raised four of the Cartwright siblings — Belinda, Lorisa, David and Johnny — on a farm in Dover.

Cartwright dropped out of Plant City High School in the 11th grade. As an adult, she held odd jobs and stayed with relatives in the Tampa Bay area when she was not living on the streets, Jay Moran said.

When she was 22, Cartwright gave birth to her first son, Joey. Two years later, by a different father, she was pregnant with Matthew. Cartwright had an arrest record for petty theft. She pleaded no contest and paid court costs.

Court documents show she was adjudicated guilty of interfering with child custody and repeatedly violated probation on that charge. Her mental condition became more evident about this time, the Morans said.

“Belinda got a little wild,” Jay Moran said.

David Cartwright, 40, Belinda’s brother, said he tried to get his sister psychiatric help. “She would get off her medication then ramble on. She would have to leave. You can’t force an adult to do anything.”

Belinda Cartwright believed her Bible would shield her from harm. She placed her faith in this, for the 12 years she spent on the road with truckers.

Days before she died, Cartwright phoned her sisters to let them know she was in Macon and was heading home. Winter warmed into spring. Then spring simmered into summer — still with no word from Cartwright.

Theories about what may have happened to their wayward sister amplified the family’s angst: Maybe she was in a mental hospital; maybe she had gotten married and settled down; maybe she was injured and suffered amnesia.

Maybe “she got the hell beat out of her” and was in a coma, Rogers said. “Maybe she said to hell with the family. We made ourselves think this.”

As Cartwright’s missing persons report collected digital dust in the Florida Department of Law Enforcement’s computer database, Plant City police Sgt. Jim Shultz expected the worst.

Detectives ran public records checks nationwide, and the results came back negative, Shultz said. A telling sign: Social Security ceased paying out Cartwright’s benefit checks, Shultz said. But he told the family not to give up hope.

It evaporated in 2002 when Cartwright’s relatives found information on the Social Security Administration’s Web site that she had died, but they didn’t find the cause of death or the location. For five years, family members sought answers from government agencies in Florida and Georgia. They got their answer five days before Christmas when Rogers called an office in Decatur.

A sympathetic government clerk told Rogers that Cartwright was in Valdosta. She was buried at Sunset Hill Cemetery in a plot reserved for the unclaimed, for those whose loved ones did not show up to say goodbye.

The family contacted the Lowndes County Sheriff’s Office and the county’s medical examiner in Valdosta to obtain copies of Cartwright’s death certificate and other documents, which detailed where she died and how.

“She met the wrong person,” Cartwright-Calloway said. “My sister was a gentle person. She was beautiful.”

She clung to the side of a moving semi in her final moments.

Left Behind

Georgia authorities’ reports gave this account of Cartwright’s death:

Shortly before 1 a.m. Feb. 22, 2001, the trucker she hitched a ride with cranked up the engine of his semi and headed toward I-75. Cartwright’s Bible, the photos of her children, and the plastic bag with her clothes and ID were in the rig with the trucker. Cartwright was not.

She was chatting with employees of the truck stop’s convenience store when she noticed the flatbed pulling out. She sprinted for the truck. She hopped on the running boards on the driver’s side and clutched the steel vertical bar bolted near the door. She banged on the window and yelled for the driver to give her stuff back.

The semi hit the curb of a median as it turned west out of the parking lot on Bellville Road. Cartwright lost her grip and fell. The rear tires of the flatbed trailer ran over her, said Georgia State Patrol Trooper Kelvin Carswell, the officer at the scene.

Cartwright’s head was crushed. The tires flattened her torso and almost tore her in half.

The semi, a black Freightliner with “Young Brothers” painted on the side in yellow and red, disappeared into the night. The Georgia State Patrol could not track down the driver, the truck or a license plate number, Carswell said.

Cartwright’s death was ruled an accident by the coroner’s office in Valdosta. Her family calls it a murder. The state trooper has not forgotten Cartwright.

“This lady has been on my heart for a long time,” said Carswell, an 11-year veteran. “I feel the driver of the truck knew he ran over her. That’s why it’s bothered me for so long.”

Lowndes County Sheriff Ashley Paulk said there is a possibility the trucker was not aware of what happened to Cartwright.

“From what I understand, he floored it” after he hit her, Carswell said. “I think he knew he did something wrong. I don’t think he planned to kill her. He did do it through negligence.”

Paulk said the state patrol asked his department to assist in the search for the semi. Despite a composite sketch of the trucker, both Paulk and Carswell said there was scant information available to track him.

Authorities opened an investigation of Young Brothers Trucking in Valapraiso, Ind., but found it a dead-end.

Cartwright-Calloway said Lowndes County detectives thought her sister “was homeless, no one was looking for her or didn’t care,” and brushed her death aside.

David Cartwright said he would like authorities to apologize and admit they did little to find the family.

Saying Goodbye

The tombstones of the poor look like pebbles strewn between the narrow footpaths and the marble mausoleums at Sunset Hill Cemetery. Belinda Cartwright’s family huddles around her small headstone and speaks in the reverent tones reserved for churches and graveyards.

She should have been buried in the family plot in Plant City, Cartwright-Calloway said. Beneath her feet, 48 inches deep, her sister’s remains lie buried not in a casket but in a cardboard box that coffins are shipped in.

David Cartwright dwells on the latest tragedy to befall his family. Brother James Jr. committed suicide. Sister Jill died at birth. Belinda would have been 42 this year.

“There’s been a lot of hurt,” David Cartwright said. “A lot of sadness.”

Belinda Cartwright’s oldest son, Joey, 20, longs for the mother he never knew. “I lost out on 40, 50 years getting to know my mother. … I never got a chance to say goodbye to her.” Cartwright-Calloway raised Joey, and Matthew, 18, was raised by his father in Lithia.

The family visits the cemetery weekly to make up for lost time. They bring fresh flowers, old memories and a lingering grief as they walk between the rows of gravestones. They pray. They cry. They hope for closure.

They say the three words that have become a mantra, the words that give shape to the hole in their lives. They engraved it on her tombstone, beneath her name.

Three words, embraced with parentheses.

We Miss You.

Researchers Buddy Jaudon and Catherine Hammer contributed to this report. Reporter Ray Reyes can be reached at (813) 865-4433 or rreyes@tampatrib.com.