Dasharay Ben’e told detectives she only had one margarita. That was her story. But by the time the toxicology results came back, the numbers told a completely different picture — one that puts her at more than twice the legal drunk driving limit, and right at the center of a fatal crash that took the life of a 19-year-old woman on a Thursday afternoon in Louisville, Kentucky. Now she’s facing a stack of criminal charges, and a family is grieving someone they’ll never see again.
The crash went down at approximately 4:53 p.m. on Thursday, May 14, in the Smoketown neighborhood on the 700 block of Logan Street — that’s the stretch between South Shelby Street and South Campbell Street, sitting close to downtown Louisville in Jefferson County. Officers from the Louisville Metro Police Department responded to reports of a vehicle that had hit a building. What they found at the scene was three people injured inside the wrecked car, an emergency scene unfolding fast, and a young woman — A’yanna Wilbanks, 19 — who had already sustained the injuries that would end her life.
A’yanna was pronounced dead at the scene. The Jefferson County Coroner’s Office confirmed her cause of death as blunt force trauma from the collision. She was 19 years old. The other two occupants, including Ben’e herself, were transported to UofL Hospital with injuries that authorities described as non-life-threatening. The name and condition of the third person in the vehicle have not been released to the public.
According to Louisville Metro Police Department spokesperson Adam Sears, preliminary findings showed the vehicle was traveling northbound on Logan Street at a high rate of speed before the driver lost control and the car crashed into the building. Investigators moved fast. Ben’e was arrested in connection with the crash, and when they sat her down, she told them about one margarita. Just one.
Then the toxicology results landed. Her blood alcohol concentration came back at 0.168. Kentucky law sets the legal limit at 0.08. Ben’e wasn’t just a little over — she was more than double the threshold that the law says makes someone too impaired to drive. That one-margarita claim and that 0.168 number are now sitting side by side in a court file, and it is hard to square the two.
Ben’e now faces charges of vehicular homicide while under the influence, wanton endangerment, criminal mischief, failure of owner to maintain insurance, and operating a vehicle while under the influence. She made her initial appearance before a judge that Saturday, and the court set her bond at $10,000. Her next court date is Tuesday, May 26, for a preliminary hearing. The legal road ahead of her is just getting started.
Out in the Smoketown neighborhood that afternoon, the emergency response was heavy and visible — police, fire, and EMS all converged on that block of Logan Street to secure the scene and get help to the people who needed it. The Louisville Metro Police Department’s Traffic Unit is still actively working the investigation. No information about structural damage to the building has been made public. What has been made public is that a 23-year-old woman got behind the wheel, and a 19-year-old woman named A’yanna Wilbanks paid for it with her life.
