LOCAL CRIME & PUBLIC SAFETY
Family headed to beach shattered by wrong-way drunk driver on Beltway
A 24-year-old Army veteran was recently sentenced for the 2023 crash in Montgomery County, Md.



Elizabeth Velez's Nissan Pathfinder after the crash. (Montgomery County State's Attorney's Office)

By Dan Morse
August 10, 2024 at 12:00 p.m. EDT

The Nissan Pathfinder was packed for the beach — adults up front, three kids in the middle, suitcases and sand toys stuffed in the back. … For Elizabeth Velez, Myrtle Beach called out as a welcome respite from working as an ER nurse in Pennsylvania. Several hours into the drive, she’d reached the Capital Beltway just north of Washington. … “It was supposed to be a good day,” a Maryland judge recently said from the bench.

The man seated in court before the judge, waiting to be sentenced, had been on the Capital Beltway the same time as Velez. Jayleen Hannor, 24, was drunk, going the wrong way, speeding and weaving in and out of oncoming traffic. Velez tried to avoid him, steering right and hitting her brakes, but Hannor slammed his Mercedes sedan head-on into the Nissan. Velez, 36, suffered catastrophic injuries. … “You killed somebody,” Montgomery County Circuit Court Judge Bibi Berry told Hannor, handing down a sentence this month of eight years.

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Dashboard video from Montgomery County Police Officer Jesse Knuth's cruiser shows Jayleen Hannor flash his lights while driving the wrong way on Interstate 270. (Video: Hadley Green/Montgomery County State’s Attorney’s Office)

For Velez’s surviving family, grief over the 2023 crash continues to be compounded by knowing what Hannor did both before and after it. … The U.S. Army veteran had been arrested twice in Georgia in 2022 on drunken-driving charges. And after striking Velez’s car, according to court records, Hannor got out of his own car without checking on anyone, climbed over several concrete Jersey walls, crossed the Beltway, and made it a mile down the road before police found him.

His fleeing, Velez’s family said, was the exact opposite of what she would have done had she come upon such a crash. … “She would have tried to save anybody,” said her sister, Ligia Torres.



Elizabeth Velez, an emergency room nurse from Pennsylvania, was killed in the crash. (Family photo)

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By Dan Morse
Dan Morse covers courts and crime in Montgomery County. He arrived at the paper in 2005, after reporting stops at the Wall Street Journal, Baltimore Sun and Montgomery (Ala.) Advertiser, where he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. He is the author of "The Yoga Store Murder." Twitter