By Theodore Brown-
There are tragedies that are difficult to comprehend. Then there are tragedies whose timing seems almost impossible to explain.
The past two years have brought a sequence of events that reads less like ordinary life than the plot of a dark novel for the family of a former teacher and news reporter, both tragically killed
Ashleigh Boyd, a 24-year-old elementary-school teacher, was killed in a Kansas road crash; ten months later, her husband, Adan Manzano, a 27-year-old Telemundo sports reporter, died while covering the Super Bowl in Louisiana; and now, within days of a Louisiana jury convicting a woman in Manzano’s death, a Kansas judge has found the driver involved in Boyd’s fatal crash guilty of vehicular homicide.
Ashleigh was driving a Nissan Versa near Topeka, Kansas, when a Ford F-150 crossed the center line and hit her vehicle head-on. Court documents say she was killed essentially immediately by the collision. Her infant daughter, Eleanor, survived, but was seriously injured.
The pickup was being driven by Todd W. Armstrong. Investigators initially suspected impaired driving, including possible cocaine use, but prosecutors ultimately charged Armstrong in March 2025 with vehicular homicide and traffic offenses.
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Ashleigh Boyd was tragically killed by the impact of a parked car
At the centre of it all is a three-year-old girl. Her name is Eleanor.She has lost both parents before she was old enough to understand what death means.
Her grandparents are now raising her. The legal system has, in the space of four days, delivered verdicts in the two cases surrounding the deaths of her parents.
But rather than bringing a neat sense of closure, the timing has exposed something more unsettling. How extraordinarily random, and at times almost surreal, human tragedy can become.
Grieving Sally Ingrid, a close family friend from Kankas, told The Eye Of Media: ”This has been a really sad story. It is incredible how fragile life can be. How something so awful can happen to two very nice people.
I have heard some people say it was a curse of some kind, connecting a jealous rival, or something sinister of that type.
‘I don’t normally believe in curses, but this was very strange. It is so heartbreaking. It is stranger than fiction that this can happen to anyone. I feel so heartbroken for the family
It is understandable that people might search for a deeper meaning.Two young parents dying suddenly in two different states. Two criminal cases and two guilty verdicts arriving almost back-to-back.
Superstition can become tempting for families experiencing such strange events, because the human mind naturally searches for patterns when confronted with events that appear impossibly connected.
There is no evidence that the deaths were caused by anything supernatural, predetermined or connected by some hidden force. The available evidence points instead to two separate tragedies with no demonstrated connection.
Boyd died in an April 2024 collision in Topeka, Kansas. According to court records cited by local media, Todd W Armstrong was driving a pickup truck on the wrong side of the road when it collided head-on with Boyd’s vehicle.
Her infant daughter was in the car and survived. Armstrong was subsequently convicted of vehicular homicide in a one-day bench trial. Manzano died approximately ten months later, in February 2025, while in the New Orleans area to cover Super Bowl LIX.
His death was connected by prosecutors to a criminal operation involving the drugging and robbery of victims. A Louisiana jury subsequently convicted Danette Colbert of negligent homicide and racketeering, while Colbert and Rickey White were both convicted of racketeering.
Nothing in those facts establishes a link between the two deaths. And perhaps that is what makes the story so disturbing.There doesn’t have to be a hidden connection for the sequence to feel almost unbearable.
The Kansas case represented an entirely different kind of pain.She was not simply a young woman killed in a traffic collision. She was a mother, a teacher and the centre of a young family whose future changed in an instant.
Her father, Brian Hinck, has spoken openly about his frustration with the criminal justice system and the timing of the two trials.
The Kansas conviction came after Armstrong had pleaded not guilty. He now faces sentencing, tentatively scheduled for November. Under Kansas law, vehicular homicide in this case is treated as a misdemeanor carrying a maximum sentence of one year, according to the Guardian’s report.
That legal reality has become another source of anguish for Boyd’s family. The question for them is not merely whether someone was found guilty.
It is whether the punishment that follows can possibly reflect the scale of what was lost. Manzano’s death was itself extraordinarily tragic.
He had travelled to Louisiana to do what he loved: report on one of America’s biggest sporting events. Instead of covering the Super Bowl, he became the subject of a criminal investigation.
Prosecutors said Colbert, White and another man, Christian Anderson, were involved in a scheme targeting victims in New Orleans’ French Quarter.
Investigators determined that Manzano had consumed alcohol and Xanax and died from positional asphyxia. Evidence presented at trial included surveillance footage and financial records linking Colbert to Manzano after their encounter
The jury did not convict Colbert of the more serious manslaughter charge. Instead, it found her guilty of negligent homicide and racketeering.
White was found guilty of racketeering but not of negligent homicide. A third defendant, Anderson, testified after entering a plea agreement involving lesser charges. The verdict was therefore not the simple ending that the word “guilty” might suggest.
It was another complicated chapter in a family already carrying extraordinary grief
Four days after the Louisiana verdict, the case surrounding Boyd’s death reached its own dramatic moment. A judge found Armstrong guilty of vehicular homicide. Suddenly, the two halves of Eleanor’s story had collided in the news cycle.
Her father had been the subject of a homicide trial in Louisiana. Her mother’s death had resulted in a homicide conviction in Kansas. And the two verdicts arrived almost simultaneously. For a family already struggling to explain two deaths to a child, thet iming is almost cruel in its symmetry.
Why humans see meaning in coincidence
There is a long history of people interpretion extraordinary coincidences as signs of fate.
Across cultures, unexpected deaths, repeated numbers, dreams and uncanny timing have often been given spiritual or supernatural explanations. Such beliefs can provide a sense of order when reality feels chaotic.
Psychology offers another explanation. Human beings are exceptionally good at detecting patterns. That ability is useful for survival, but it can also lead us to perceive meaning in events that are actually unrelated.
In Eleanor’s case, the sequence is genuinely extraordinary. But extraordinary does not necessarily mean supernatural.
Sometimes coincidence can produce a story so improbable that it feels designed. This may be one of those cases.
The deeper tragedy is not the mystery
The most powerful part of this story may ultimately have nothing to do with superstition. It is about what remains after the headlines disappear.
Eleanor is growing up without the mother who taught children at Lowman Hill Elementary School and without the father who travelled to report on the biggest sporting events.
Her grandparents have deliberately shielded her from the details.
For now, she knows only that her parents are in heaven and that one day she will see them again. That is perhaps the only explanation a three-year-old can carry.
The courts may now have delivered their verdicts. But verdicts cannot restore parents. They cannot return childhood memories that will never be made. They cannot answer every question that Eleanor will eventually ask.
What happened to her family is extraordinarily unlikely.
It is also painfully real. There is no evidence of a curse, a supernatural design or a hidden connection between the deaths of Ashleigh Boyd and Adan Manzano.
There is, instead, something more unsettling:. Two unrelated human tragedies happened to strike the same young family, and the justice systems investigating them happened to speak almost at the same time.
That coincidence may be impossible to explain emotionally, but it does not need a supernatural explanation to be devastating.