Victim's mom: Driver 'drowsy' before Georgia crash killed 5

CLAXTON, Ga. (AP) — The mother of a Georgia man who was among five killed in a head-on highway crash said her son told her by phone shortly before the deadly collision that he feared the car's driver was nodding off at the wheel.

Devon L. Mobley, 24, and two co-workers had been driving all night to return home to southeast Georgia from Virginia, where they had been on a job for a moving company, family members said. Just before 6 a.m. Wednesday, their car swerved across the median on Interstate 16 and slammed into an oncoming vehicle. All occupants of both vehicles were killed.

The crash happened barely 40 miles from Mobley's hometown of Claxton, located 50 miles west of Savannah. His mother, Dot Mobley, told WTOC-TV Thursday that she spoke to her son possibly minutes before the collision. He said he was concerned about his co-worker, Aundrey Douglas, who was driving.

"He was telling me that Arnie was kind of drowsy and he was about to have a car accident," Dot Mobley said.

She said her son passed the phone to Douglas.

"I asked him to really please pull over and stop at a rest area," she told WTOC.

Douglas, 49, also died in the crash along with co-worker Willie James Braggs, 62. Their car slammed into 66-year-old Judy Vincent's vehicle as she was driving her stepson, 44-year-old Ronnie White, to work in Savannah from their home in rural Eden. Vincent and White perished as well.

The Georgia State Patrol declined to comment Friday on Dot Mobley's account of her son's phone call, saying only that its investigation into the crash remains open.

Dot Mobley wasn't home Friday as her family made funeral arrangements for her son, one of six siblings who had been nicknamed Pistol at an early age by his great-grandmother.

"She would say, 'Look at that little Pistol, saying all kinds of funny things,'" said Pennie Mobley, the young man's grandmother.

Pennie Mobley said her grandson was always trying to make life easier for both her and his mother. He would buy them all lunch to spare them from cooking, she said, or pay his mother's bills if she was short on cash. She said he recently announced he was going to quit his moving company job and join the military.

"If you were out and down," Pennie Mobley said, "when he came around, he would uplift your spirits."