Even in death, Alyssa Henley couldn’t escape the turmoil that tormented much of her life — which ended earlier this month when she was tragically killed in a high-speed motorcycle crash on a Queens parkway just days before her high school graduation.
Her grieving mother, Crystal Moore, wanted to bury the 17-year-old girl in the white lace graduation dress she never got to wear. But Alyssa’s adoptive family nixed that idea when they decided to cremate the body, Moore said.
“The day she passed away I talked to her,” Moore told the Daily News. “We were planning on going to buy a dress for her graduation and we were gonna go Monday. I have the dress at home. It’s very depressing. I went and bought it. I know her style.”
The burial dispute was just another example of the ongoing drama Alyssa had endured, strife she would go to great lengths to avoid — even if it put her on the back of a motorcycle with a much older man.
Alyssa was seated behind the 29-year-old man when he lost control zipping north on the Cross Island Parkway trying to exit onto the ramp for the southbound Whitestone Expressway just past midnight June 19, cops said.
He struck a curb and Alyssa went flying off the bike, dying at the scene from a massive head injury. She was wearing a helmet but it was not a model approved by the Department of Transportation, a police source said.
The day she died, Alyssa had planned on visiting her old babysitter who is in hospice care after suffering an aneurysm and a brain tumor that led to a stroke.
The motorcycle operator, identified by police sources as Diando Ricketts of St. Albans, was taken to New York-Presbyterian Queens Hospital in stable condition.
He has not been charged as cops continue to investigate — but Alyssa’s grief-stricken mother wants to see him arrested.
“I hope for the rest of his life he hears my daughter scream,” Moore said. “I hope he hears that scream for the rest of his life. That’s what I really hope. Other than that…
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