The end of this bride’s life was ugly. But the rest of it was filled with so much beauty.
The months, weeks and days leading up to Samantha Miller’s wedding last Friday were probably pretty similar, generally speaking, to a lot of run-ups to a lot of weddings: In other words, they were fraught with fears and frustrations.
During her first dress-shopping trip with her mom, Sam tried on 40 dresses — and didn’t like any of them.
Two weeks before her wedding, she learned that the photographer who was booked to shoot the ceremony and reception had quit. Then early last week, the forecast was showing a 90% chance of rain for Folly Beach, the South Carolina city that was to host her hitching to fiancé Aric Hutchinson.
But the word those closest to the 34-year-old Charlotte native have been using, over and over, to describe how everything worked out for all but the very last, very tragic part of that day, is “perfect.”
Her mother, Lisa Miller, says the dress Sam finally found and wore was “the most beautiful dress I’ve ever seen.” The photography company took care of replacing the old shooter with a new one. And the weather for the 5 p.m. ceremony next to the ocean at South Carolina’s Folly Beach County Park turned out to be blue skies and temps in the 70s.
Even the imperfect parts of Sam’s wedding felt perfect.
Like when she couldn’t find a place to hide before the ceremony, so she holed up in the cargo area of her dad’s Toyota 4Runner in the Pelican Watch Pavilion parking lot. Like when the pineapple scalp tumbled off the top of the wedding cake her older sister Mandi had created for them, as Sam tried shoving a chunk of cake into Aric’s mouth. Like when Sam surprised Lisa with a mother-daughter dance and the two couldn’t quite figure out whether to hold each other close or at arm’s length so somehow wound up doing both.
In photos and videos taken by friends and family that day, Sam was clearly radiating joy as she celebrated both the end of wedding planning and the beginning of her new life with Aric.
“She definitely was Bridezilla, probably for the past — I don’t know, at least six months, man. I was like, ‘Sam! Stop!’” Lisa recalls, laughing. “‘Who are you?’ But literally the day we were getting ready for the wedding, she was fine. It was like Sam was back, you know? It’s a lot of pressure planning for a wedding, and she said, ‘Mom, I want it to be perfect.’ And honestly, the wedding was perfect.”
Lisa pauses, inhaling and exhaling sharply before continuing. “That’s what makes it so bad, the contrast of what happened afterward.”
Sam’s closest friends and family know that to convey the message they want to convey in the wake of Sam’s death it means sharing the story of what happened shortly after she left the reception at Pelican Watch Pavilion in the rear-facing bench seat on the back of a golf cart with Aric.
They know it means re-living the feelings they felt when they heard a driver who allegedly was intoxicated and speeding plowed her sedan into the cart from behind, killing Sam and putting Aric and two of his relatives in the hospital.
And they will.
But before they talk about the horrible memory of her death, they want to tell you some things about Sam and the way she lived life that will always make them smile.
If you knew Sam Miller, you knew
Sam loved the water. “When she was little,” Lisa says, “if she was having one of her little hissy fits, I could just throw her in the bathtub and she was fine.” During family spring break trips to North Carolina beaches, Sam would go in the water no matter how cold it was. And as a teenager, she joined the swim teams at both South Mecklenburg High School and in her neighborhood, the latter of which she helped coach after graduating. Though she eventually developed a fear of jellyfish, her lifetime love of water, her mom says, is what led Sam to move to Folly Beach with Aric a couple of years ago.
Sam was not just a great friend, but a blunt one, too. Her best friend since age 19 was Ashley Favret, whom Sam met when they both were servers at the Chili’s restaurant at Charlotte-Douglas International Airport. A couple years later, the two were getting ready to go to a club when Sam noticed that Ashley — a self-described “big Disney fan” — was wearing Mickey Mouse earrings. “She about tackled me on the bed,” Ashley recalls, “and yelled at me basically to them them out of my ears because I was too old to be wearing Mickey Mouse earrings out to a club.” She wound up taking them out and wearing a pair of Sam’s earrings. Ashley says it was a story Sam loved telling people, which is why Ashley shared it during her maid-of-honor toast at Sam’s wedding last Friday.
Sam had a foolproof trick for getting people to laugh. Says Ashley: “Sam had what she called ‘The Sam Laugh.’ Sam would fake-laugh in photos — she’d put her head back and pretend to be laughing — and she’d tell you to do it, too. It became such a regular thing for her that we would automatically just start cracking up laughing for real ... but it would get the most amazing pictures. It was one of the funniest things about her. ‘Do The Sam Laugh, it’ll be a great picture!’ And we’d do it, and we’d just bust out laughing, every time.”
Aric charmed both Sam and her mom. The couple met while both were on business in Idaho Falls. During their first conversation, when she was getting coffee from the lobby of their hotel, Sam mentioned she didn’t like having to go somewhere to get coffee and that she liked drinking it in bed. The next morning, he knocked on the door of her room toting four different types of Starbucks drinks. Deeper into their relationship, Sam went to visit Aric in his former home state of Utah and brought along her mom, who likes to tell of how when they all rented scooters to explore downtown Salt Lake City, Aric always made sure to help them navigate street crossings safely. “And I was just like, ‘OK, this is the guy,’” Lisa says.
Sam wasn’t qualified for her first job at the last company she worked for. Or was she? After cycling through various jobs in her 20s, she somehow landed an opportunity at an IT solutions company in Huntersville as a recruiter in 2020. “And Sam knows nothing about tech,” Lisa says. “So that was a funny thing. She would say, ‘Mom, I don’t know what I’m doing.’ And I’m like, ‘Just keep fakin’ it till you make it, girl.’” She eventually moved into a role with the marketing department, and she was working remotely full time from the apartment she shared in Folly Beach with Aric and her two cats.
About those two cats ... There’s Blue, who had been with Sam for several years, and Lulu, who Sam had gotten after meeting Aric. She truly coddled these cats. Because Lulu is skittish and apparently doesn’t like humans wearing shoes, Sam would make all visitors remove their footwear upon entering the apartment, Lisa says. Crazier still? Obsessively, her mom says, Sam would fill an automatic feeder with food that would dispense kibble every three hours, morning, noon and night.
Sam has no filter. On the way to the rehearsal dinner, Ashley says, Sam was talking about having taken out her birth-control device and all the love-making she and Aric were going to do over the weekend. Both Aric and Sam’s dad were in the car, too. “I’m like, ‘What the ---- is going on??’” Ashley recalls, laughing. But she quickly gets serious.
“They were very much looking forward to having children,” Ashley says, her voice breaking with emotion. “It breaks my heart.”
‘There’s not a thing that I would change’
About 120 guests smiled, cheered and wept as Aric kissed the bride while standing with his feet on the sand, in the shadow of a triangular wooden arch and gentle waves lapping at the shore just behind them.
Dinner included a taco bar and a queso fountain, and drinks were served from a Chug-a-lug Wagon stocked with beer, wine and cocktails.
The speeches, including Ashley’s, were beautiful. But the dances stole the show.
Samantha Miller was known for a variety of talents. Dancing wasn’t one of them. At all. So when the brand-new bride was led out onto the dance floor by her brand-new husband, her mom was expecting to smile, to get teary, and to cringe a little.
“Sam,” her mom Lisa Miller says, chuckling softly, “has always danced like Elaine from ‘Seinfield.’ She’s not a dancer. My other daughter is a competitive dancer. But Sam probably got that from me. I don’t have any rhythm.”
That’s why it was so dumbfounding, to those who knew Sam best, when her wedding DJ started spinning John Legend’s “U Move, I Move” and she started twirling around the dance floor as if ... well, maybe not as if she’d been doing it all her life, but at least like she’d been secretly taking a whole lot of lessons. (Turns out she hadn’t.)
“We were like, ‘What is this?’” says that other daughter, Mandi.
Then Sam sprang the mother-daughter dance on Lisa, though, and the gracefulness Sam had managed to conjure up for her first dance went away as quickly as it had materialized. The two moved around awkwardly, never quite finding a perfect rhythm to what they considered “their song” — Bruno Mars’ “Just the Way You Are.” Yet it was the thought that counted, and the thought brought them and many of the guests to tears.
When I see your face
There’s not a thing that I would change
’Cause you’re amazing
Just the way you are
Having shared a uniquely close bond with each other since Lisa gave birth to her 34 years ago as a struggling single mother, Sam looked euphoric, excitedly thrusting a finger toward her mom every time she shout-sang the word “you,” your” or “you’re.” As they embraced at the close of the ritual, Lisa said the last words she would ever speak directly to her daughter.
It was their catchphrase, which Sam repeated right back to her:
“Love you more.”
A decked-out cart and a forgotten phone
They were similar to the last words Sam ever said to her best friend and maid of honor, Ashley.
Shortly after 9:30 p.m., Sam asked Ashley if she could go put the decorations — a “Just Married” sign, gold-spray-painted cans and a white ribbon — on the golf cart that Sam’s boss had loaned to them to use for the event.
Ashley told her yep, that she was on her way out to do just that.
“Thank you,” Sam told her. “I love you.”
Fifteen minutes later, Sam and Aric were hustling between the rows of guests holding sparklers over their heads, then climbing onto the backseat of the golf cart with Aric’s relatives in the front seats, then disappearing off into the darkness to be ferried to the honeymoon suite at the big beachfront house they’d rented.
But just moments later, they came back.
Sam had forgotten her cellphone in Ashley’s car. Ashley never saw Sam, only the nephew whom Sam had sent to retrieve the device for her. Ashley knows she shouldn’t think like this, and has tried as hard as she can not to, yet the thought has haunted her.
“I wish I didn’t have her phone because those few minutes —” Ashley’s voice starts to break, and she stays silent for a few seconds before continuing “— could have saved her.”
‘Siren after siren after siren’
Every memory Sam’s friends and family have about the rest of the night is horrible. Or, if there’s an even stronger and darker word you can think of for them to use, it’s that one.
Lisa recounts sitting on the balcony of the house they were staying at together with Mandi, and suddenly hearing “siren after siren after siren after siren” as a sickening feeling formed in the pits of her stomach. She talks about fearing the worst when Aric’s sister-in-law pulled up not long after 10:30 and told her and Mandi to get in the car, that there’d been an accident.
At the scene, there were plenty of first responders but no information about Sam. They were directed to the hospital, which they rushed to, only to wait and wait to try to get somebody to tell them something, anything.
Ultimately, the news came from Sam’s dad. That Sam — who was still wearing her wedding dress, who just hours earlier had been as happy and as alive as her loved ones had ever seen her — was dead.
All Lisa remembers after that is screaming until she couldn’t scream anymore.
Maybe eight hours later — or maybe four, or maybe six ... who knows? The whole night was a blur of shock and anguish — Mandi was standing in a courthouse talking about her late baby sister. She’s addressing a judge, but there’s another key person listening in, too: Jamie Lee Komoroski, the 25-year-old woman who was arrested and charged with one count of reckless homicide and three counts of felony DUI resulting in great bodily harm.
Mandi was there to provide a statement at Komoroski’s bond hearing.
“I said, ‘There’s not enough time, in this courtroom, to convey the impact that this has had on my family, and everyone in my sister’s life. She was the happiest she’s ever been, on that day. She’s a sister. A daughter. A cat mom. She had plans to be a mom. She wanted to have kids. … But now she can’t be any of that.’”
Annette Hutchinson also was in the courtroom to speak on behalf of her son Aric, who remains hospitalized in critical condition.
The judge’s decision was for Komoroski to be held without bail.
A beautiful way to start — and end
In the countless local, regional, national and international news stories that have been generated about Sam’s death, much of the focus has been on the devastating account of how it happened.
It’s hard not to fixate on that. Even Lisa has done so. The first two nights after her daughter was killed, she says, she could think of almost nothing except what she imagined her daughter’s death must have looked like, all night long. The car coming, too fast; plowing into the cart, into Aric and Sam’s bodies.
There are only two reasons she’s even agreed to talk to reporters (and she has only talked to a handful): One, because of the family’s desire to raise awareness about the impact of drunk driving, and perhaps even more importantly, two, because she wants people to know what a bright light Sam was.
Which brings us to this — a story that describes not the brutal moment right after Sam’s wedding but the beautiful moment right before it.
The one were she was holed up in the back of her dad’s 4Runner, “because there’s nowhere at the pavilion to hide, nowhere for her to go in her dress,” says Lisa, who found Sam in there laying on her stomach with her legs up, rewriting her vows because she’d scribbled them fairly messily the first time.
She lets out a rare laugh as she describes the scene.
“Not too many brides with their hair and makeup done up perfectly are gonna be laying in the back of a 4Runner that probably wasn’t really that clean right before their wedding. But that’s Sam. She might be OCD about feeding the cat 20 times a day, but at that moment, she didn’t care.”
Lisa propped the door open, pulled her phone out, leaned in over the seat, and told Sam she had to take a photo of this.
Sam turned her head to the left and flashed a smile that stayed on her face for pretty much the rest of her life.
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Mandi Jenkins, Sam’s older sister, set up a GoFundMe in Sam’s name. To donate: gofundme.com/f/samantha-miller-gone-too-soon
