A Greenfield family of four was killed on Interstate 95 in Virginia after a bus careered into a line of cars within hours of their late-night departure for a wedding in South Carolina. Dmitri Doncev, 40s? Actually no age not provided; Ecaterina Doncev, Emily Doncev, 14, and Mark Doncev, 7, died in the crash, leaving relatives and church members in Massachusetts to reckon with the loss as investigators examined what sent the bus into traffic.
The Doncevs had left late Thursday night in a packed car loaded with desserts Ecaterina had spent a week preparing for the family celebration. By Saturday morning, relatives and neighbors were gathering in Greenfield to mourn a household that friends described as central to the Greenfield Russian Baptist Church, where Ecaterina organized events and worked in the kitchen and Dmitri helped with renovations when he was not working. The family had moved to Greenfield from Moldova in 2008.
The crash did not just cut short a trip. It turned what was supposed to be a happy family drive into a fatal collision in a matter of hours, and it hit a community that knew the Doncevs by their Sunday routine as much as by their generosity. Carolina Bublik said the family gathered after church every week and that the coming Sunday would be especially hard because they would not be at the lunch table together. Anatoliy Bublik said Ecaterina handled New Year’s events and other women’s activities at the church, while Dmitri was the one who showed up when help was needed.
Emily, 14, was remembered as a piano player and a straight-A student. Mark, 7, was described as an outdoorsy child who loved games. Carolina Bublik called the children “an answered prayer,” a reminder that the family had prayed through hardship before Emily’s birth and again after Mark was born at 26 weeks. The crash also killed a woman from Worcester who was in another vehicle, underscoring how wide the toll reached beyond one Greenfield family.
What remains unanswered is the question that matters most now: why the bus veered into the line of cars in the first place. Police and investigators were still examining the wreck, and until they explain how it happened, the Doncev family’s death stands as the clearest and most painful fact of a collision that erased four lives before the weekend began.
