A Marin teen's crash killed four friends. Now families divided by tragedy reveal all they've endured

On that terrible evening one year ago, Christie Batanides of Fairfax dropped her 16-year-old daughter, Josalynn Osborn, outside a local pet shop called For Paws. While the girl everyone called "Josy" met up with friends who had planned a sleepover, Batanides and her older daughter, Dylynn, retired to her sister's nearby home for a night of decorating cookies.

Less than 20 minutes later, Batanides was sitting on a couch when she felt the buzz of an automatic message. Josy's iPhone had triggered a "Crash Detection" alert. She made out the words "SOS" and "crash," her daughter's name and the coordinates of a location.

As she and her older daughter drove west through the woods, they could summon only Josy's voicemail. Then they saw smoke through the trees. They arrived at a scene of fire trucks and ambulances. A Volkswagen Tiguan had slammed into a hulking redwood just off the right edge of two-lane San Geronimo Valley Drive. The SUV was mangled and engulfed in flames.

"Josy's in the car!" the mother yelled to a firefighter friend she'd spotted. That was before Batanides - who like some of the other parents involved in the tragedy spoke about the events of last April 18 for the first time in recent interviews with the Chronicle - collapsed in a sprawl of fire hoses, and before she saw what she now describes as "the things we shouldn't have seen."

"I remember her saying to me, maybe two months before she died, ‘I'm not afraid to die, I'm just afraid of what it would do to you,'" Batanides said. The conversation, she recalled, had been about the risks of dirt-biking and bull-riding, not driving. "Those were the things that I thought could hurt her."

The crash and engine fire just before 7:30 p.m. killed Josy and three more of the six girls in the vehicle: Sienna Katz and Ada Kepley, 15, and 14-year-old Olive Koren. Marley Barclay, 14, was injured but she survived, as did the 16-year-old driver, who was severely burned. The two freshmen and four sophomores at Archie Williams High in San Anselmo were friends and friends of friends; some had known each other since first grade.

Following a six-month investigation, Marin County prosecutors charged the driver with misdemeanor vehicular manslaughter. The only girl in the group who'd gotten her license, she was not yet allowed to drive other youths without an adult in the car. The CHP concluded she crashed because she was speeding in a 40-mph zone, relying on images of a speedometer that "froze" at roughly 65 mph when the impact cut the SUV's power.

Marley Barclay had told officers that all she remembered was hearing the driver shriek before seeing oncoming headlights, raising questions about whether another car could have run the girls off the road. But the CHP found no evidence supporting this.

In the year since the crash, its catastrophic toll - and the tensions arising from the decision to charge the driver - have divided the girls' families and the intertwined communities around San Anselmo, Fairfax and Woodacre. Bound by the same tragedy, people who knew the girls have arrived at different conclusions about what punishment the badly injured teenage driver deserves, and whether the focus instead should be on her emotional recovery.

Some, including Batanides, say the girl has not shown remorse and must be held accountable. Some say she has suffered enough for what was by all accounts a youthful accident. Others contend the girl - whom the Chronicle is not naming in accordance with its policy to protect juveniles in criminal proceedings - did, in fact, swerve to avoid an oncoming car.

Resentments developed and lawsuits multiplied. At one point, a petition attempted to block the driver and her mother, who is a teacher at the high school, from returning to the campus. Later, the driver's mother unsuccessfully sought a restraining order against one of Josy's closest friends, alleging a campaign of harassment.

In her first public comment, the driver's mother told the Chronicle over text, "We think constantly about the lives lost, and we have deep compassion for the families and the entire community affected. At the same time, our family has also been subjected to ongoing harassment that has gone far beyond grief or accountability."

Last week, as the driver's mother drove her daughter near their home, they noticed Josy's sister and cousin driving behind them. Though neither side would admit to initiating the ensuing exchange, all four participants admitted to raising middle fingers out the windows of their vehicles. "I am not proud of our behavior," the driver's mother said, adding that the incident was "part of a bigger picture."

Marin County District Attorney Lori Frugoli said her office recognized the fractures in the community over an "incredibly painful and emotional situation for everyone involved."

"We understand that people may see this case differently, especially given the tragic circumstances," she said in a statement to the Chronicle. "Our responsibility, however, is not to resolve public debate - it is to ensure that the legal process is fair, thorough and based on evidence."

Headed to a sleepover

What led to the crash could hardly have been more innocent. A plan was hatched for the girls to hang out at Sienna Katz's home in Woodacre. They'd meet up at the downtown Fairfax pet store where the driver was getting off her shift. Some of them would sleep over, while others, including Josy, were invited at the last minute and didn't plan to stay long.

Josy was a tenacious teen who stood out at the school in bucolic and largely affluent Marin: She worked construction on the weekends, could change the brakes of a car, and took up dirt-biking and wrestling. She dreamed of riding bulls on the rodeo circuit and for a time wanted to become a firefighter.

Creative and silly, Ada Kepley enjoyed being unique. She was shy about her height at 6-foot-1, but was blossoming in 10th grade. Drawing in notebooks and experimenting with piercings, she envisioned becoming a tattoo artist. "She would make things that you would never ever think of," her mother, Linda Kepley, said. "I always used to say to her, if there's a zombie apocalypse, I hope I'm with you because I'll have a chance of surviving, because you'll just think of something."

Among her friends, Sienna was more reserved and reflective. Though she loved horseback riding, teaching her dog tricks and performing in school plays, she most cherished sleepovers at her mother Peg Minicozzi's house, staying up with friends to giggle, listen to music and share secrets. Minicozzi, the principal of the elementary school where her daughter met Josy and Ada, noticed that Sienna could be more encouraging of others than she was of herself - and had resolved to work with her daughter on this perfectionist streak.

In recent years, Sienna had been joined at the hip to her lacrosse teammate Olive Koren, who was vivacious and theatrical - a connector of people, said her grandparents, San Anselmo residents Bruce and Gail Koren, who raised her since age 7. Olive wasn't afraid to talk to adults and gravitated toward kids who were feeling left out of a group.

The driver had also made an impression on the Korens. She had begun coming over in the mornings to motivate Olive to get ready on time for school. "I'm getting her going!" the girl would declare. Linda Kepley said the driver had also been a positive influence on Ada, who worked with her at For Paws. The girl went camping with the Kepleys and helped Ada with her homework.

Though she knew the girl was a new driver, Linda Kepley said she had occasionally permitted her daughter to ride with her, but instructed them to stay off the freeway. When she'd track her daughter's location, she was relieved to see the icon moving on side streets.

As for Batanides, she said she'd met the driver a few times but didn't know exactly how old she was or when she had received her license.

When the crash happened, some parents learned immediately, through calls or notifications. Linda Kepley, crying while watching a movie at the Fairfax Theater, initially ignored the vibration on her phone. The Korens, at home when they saw the alert, assumed Olive had been in a fender-bender. "Knowing Olive," Gail Koren said, "we thought she was going to be sitting on the side of the road laughing when we got there."

Marley's mother, Jessica Glantz-Mira, was on her Peloton in her San Anselmo home when her daughter called. The girl, sitting in the third-row seat on the driver's side, had been pulled out by passing motorists who broke her window with a plank. On the line, Marley screamed that she had been in an accident and that one of her eyes was bleeding.

The stuck speedometer

The driver was taken to the Shriners Children's burn center in Sacramento. Days later, records show, her mother told CHP officers she had a "clear conscience" that her daughter had been driving safely - and that she had not been drinking, which prosecutors later confirmed.

Marley was treated at Children's Hospital Oakland for a severed lung, a concussion and other injuries. She continued to tell CHP investigators about her memory of approaching headlights.

In October, the CHP weighed in, citing the stuck speedometer in determining that the "proximate causes of the crash" were the driver's unsafe speed and turning movement, findings that prompted the manslaughter allegation. The girl has denied the charge, which carries a maximum sentence of one year in detention. At a hearing next month, her attorney is seeking to dismiss the case by challenging the CHP's handling and analysis of the speedometer.

Batanides said her memories of the night gave her no reason to doubt investigators. She couldn't see any skid marks in the road, she said, and the Volkswagen was folded like an accordion. "I knew she had to have been driving too fast," Batanides said. "Cars don't just burst into flames."

But some of the victims' relatives felt the CHP had too easily dismissed the possibility the girls were forced off the road, and had not taken seriously two witnesses who reported seeing red and orange pickup trucks on San Geronimo Valley Drive close to the time of the crash.

One of these motorists was allegedly driving recklessly around a half hour before the crash; the other was said to have been parked in the middle of the road afterward, appearing to call 911. Investigators, though, wrote that the descriptions of the trucks didn't match and that they couldn't find evidence to link them.

"I feel like someone is responsible for killing the girls, and it's not (the driver)," Gail Koren said. For Bruce Koren, the question was: "Is somebody getting away with murder?"

Linda Kepley, though concerned that investigators may have missed crucial details, said she's come to adopt a different, less certain perspective on the case. She wonders: Did the driver accidentally step on the gas while meaning to brake? Were the girls getting chased by boys? Was she distracted? Was one of the other girls distracting her? Did she just make a bad choice?

"If she was speeding, she's a teenage girl, and kids speed," said Kepley. "I've already made my peace with this. I think what people really need to do is to ask themselves, ‘Did I do that at that age?' We're all human beings. We're all flawed."

The dispute over the accident has extended to the safety of the two-lane roadway. In February, Sienna's father, Rob Katz, sued the driver and Marin County, accusing the latter of creating a "dangerous condition" by failing to install safeguards along the road.

About a year before their children's deaths, another accident had occurred just 500 feet from the crash site. A 17-year-old driver who admitted he was speeding crossed into the oncoming lane before the vehicle left the road, hit a tree, flipped and burst into flames. One of the passengers was severely injured.

In December, after the launch of a petition seeking to remove cars from the road entirely, the county voted to approve reducing the speed limit to 30 mph.

‘Connections run deep'

Nearly everyone in and around Fairfax seemed touched by some aspect of the crash. The young motorists who pulled Marley and Ada from the car were themselves Archie Williams alums, home from college on break. As one, Nick Grubb, helped Ada, he recognized her as the younger sister of an old friend.

Grubb, who after the crash began training to become an EMT, says he still feels regret that he could not break the window on the other side of the car, where three of the girls had died upon impact.

"In a small community like ours, connections run deep," said Stephanie Hellman, the mayor of Fairfax, where plans are under way for a memorial to the girls outside the Women's Club. Hellman's husband once coached two of the girls in lacrosse. "My children are similar in age to these young women," she said, "so our paths crossed in meaningful ways over the years in classrooms, on athletic fields, at community gatherings."

Roughly two months after the crash - before the charges were filed - Linda Kepley reached out to the driver's mother, asking if she could visit the girl, who was still recovering at Shriners. Though the cause was still under review, Kepley wanted to tell her she didn't blame her. She brought a pot of chili her husband had made.

In her hospital bed, the driver was frantic and emotional, Kepley said. She told Kepley she didn't mean for anything to happen, saying she hadn't consumed any drugs or alcohol. "I know," Kepley recalled saying, before the girl started to cry. They talked about Ada's memorial, and then she drove home.

"It was selfish, honestly, because (going there) made me feel better," said Kepley. "Because (the driver) never wanted this to happen, ever. And the consequence of this, without all this other court nonsense, that's such a heavy burden. Anything else you do to her is never going to compare."

Less than a month later, the driver, now out of the burn center, posted a selfie to Snapchat. She wore a neck brace and knit cap, burns and bruises covering her chest and the left side of her face. "I'm out ya'll," she wrote, glancing to the side.

The photo and caption, and a video the driver allegedly reposted to TikTok about wrestling just being an excuse to touch people, were viewed as shocking affronts by the family and friends of Josy, who was a proud wrestler. Soon, a boy who had been close friends with Josy began to message and call the driver and her mother, who had been one of his teachers at Archie Williams High.

In a letter to a judge, he admitted to writing the driver a "mean and hurtful" message and prank-calling the family several times after watching the video. He said he found the driver's repost of the video "exceedingly offensive" to his friend, whose "spirit and memory was being trampled on."

The driver's mother applied for a restraining order against the boy that would have forced him to transfer to another school. She said he had gone further, repeatedly egging her home and calling her daughter, whose father is Black, a racial slur. She also alleged her daughter's mental health had plummeted and her blood pressure had spiked because of the harassment.

In an interview, the boy and his mother denied he had egged the home or used the slur, alleging he had been blamed for actions by other teens angry at the driver.

The driver's mother said her daughter, while in the hospital, received messages telling her she "killed her friends," and that she had been verbally attacked and repeatedly threatened since. "I understand that people are grieving," she said. "But there is a difference between grief and sustained harassment."

Marley's mother, Glantz-Mira, said she was targeted for her support of the driver. She, Kepley and the Korens donned red-heart stickers bearing the driver's name while attending court hearings. Glantz-Mira said she lost clients in her work as an esthetician, some explicitly parting ways with her because of the "side she had taken," she said.

Meanwhile, her daughter - who still cannot sleep alone or ride alone in the back seat of a car - noticed schoolmates giving her dirty looks, while online comments accused her of lying to protect the driver. The family barely goes out now, Glantz-Mira said.

"It's hard for me to picture someone going that fast on that road," she said. "If she had been, Marley would have said something. She's a scaredy-cat …. But even if I were to find out (the driver) was speeding, I want to say that I'd still feel the same."

Searching for peace

Batanides, who was raised in Fairfax, said she has felt supported by other longtime residents, while some newcomers have been more sympathetic to the driver. Now an insomniac, she finds herself replaying the events of that day in her mind, lost in endless potential outcomes. She hasn't touched anything in Josy's room, not the glass of water by her bed or the clothes hung on the back of the bathroom door.

It's difficult for her to understand the other families' embrace of the driver, she said. If it were her own daughter behind the wheel, "I would have empathy," she said, "but I also wouldn't excuse it."

Kepley wishes she could eradicate the tension in the courtroom and community between people who were once close. She said she is concerned the driver is being saddled with a burden she shouldn't have to carry, just as she believes her position has made some think she must not be as devastated or angry about the loss of her daughter.

"Nothing could be further from the truth," she said. The decision to forgive, irrespective of certainty, has brought her some peace. "If I had all this anger toward her," she said, "that would be a whole other dragon to slay."

Minicozzi, Sienna's mother, has not gone to any of the court hearings, she said in her first interview about the crash. She hopes for accountability, though not necessarily through punitive measures like juvenile hall.

Until recently, she said, she couldn't look at photos of her daughter. Seeing her in photos solidified that images were all she had left of her only child.

Now, back to work as a principal after nine months away, Minicozzi has turned her focus to helping other children, particularly those who are struggling. Being busy and surrounded by the light of her pupils has brought healing, even if it took a long time for that to feel possible. She started at Manor Elementary in Fairfax when Sienna was in kindergarten, a year before her daughter met Ada and Josy. She watched all of the girls grow up.

The depth of her suffering feels impossible to bear. She knows it must be the same for all of the other families, no matter what position they've taken. "Everybody," she said, "has the right to go through this in the way they need to."

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This story was originally published April 18, 2026 at 10:46 AM.