DAYTONA BEACH SHORES, Fla. – The family of a 63-year-old toll booth worker killed when a driver crashed into her booth and plunged into the ocean off Daytona Beach Shores is speaking out, remembering her as a loving matriarch who kept everyone around her laughing.
Tammy Jo Baker was a mother, a grandmother, and a soon-to-be great-grandmother who, according to her family, lived for the beach and the people she loved.
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“She was always smiling. She was always happy,” Baker’s granddaughter, Hannah McBride, said.
Baker was working at an access ramp in Daytona Beach Shores when a woman drove into the toll booth Baker was inside before driving into the water. Video taken in the moments after the crash shows the truck submerged in the ocean.
The family said Baker’s connection to that stretch of coastline ran deep.
“She loved the beach,” Baker’s daughter, Luella Harris, said.
“She lived on the beach. So, like just working out here was probably like a plus to it, you know? So, it was very, very difficult for her to want to be away from [the beach],” McBride added.
For Harris, the grief is wrapped in memories of her mother’s humor.
“My mom was good for saying the most inappropriate things, but it always made everybody laugh,” she said.
That humor, her family says, showed up in the most unexpected moments, including one that Harris-Baker cannot help but laugh about even now.
“‘Hotel California’, and she was just singing it, and then all of a sudden, she broke out in like a death metal voice, and like, the whole place was like, what? What is that?” she recalled.
Family members gathered for a vigil at the beach where she was working that day to honor her life. Daytona Beach Shores Mayor Nancy Miller attended the vigil and used the moment to urge drivers to be more careful in the area.
“Slow down, slow down,” Miller said. “You have to know this is a driving beach and please slow down.”
For those who knew and loved Baker, the loss is still raw and difficult to process.
“It’s very shocking. It’s hard to hear, like, people just talking about it and you don’t even know, that was my mom,” Harris said.
As her family prepares to say goodbye, they want the world to know Baker was the force that held them all together.
“She was the glue of the family. So, it’s going to be hard to pick up those pieces. But mainly, we’re really thankful that she had lived a good life,” McBride said.