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GREENSBORO — At 8:46 Saturday morning, Arielle Parker called her mother from the cafeteria at Wingate University to fib just a little about how much she was enjoying her new-found college experience.

“She wanted to hide how happy she was in college because she knew how hard it was for me, her leaving,” Djuana Parker said. “I didn’t know what was going to happen at 9:15.”

Nobody could.

Barely a half hour later, the car Arielle was riding in with three other students would be crushed by a grain truck at a crossroads not far from the Union County campus. And the 18-year-old June graduate of Grimsley High School would lose her promising life only days before the start of her freshman year.

Now parents Djuana and James Parker are struggling with the gut-wrenching question of how such a horrible thing could happen to such a loving child, who lived to sing and to make other people happy.

“She really did love singing,” said James Parker, a visual communications specialist at N.C. A&T since 2002 and a former News & Record photographer. “She particularly loved to sing gospel music. She loved the Lord. And I mean that very, very sincerely.”

Arielle leaves behind her parents, older sister Ashtenne, a junior at East Carolina University, and brothers Shaed, 14, and Stone, 11. And she also leaves a bushel basket of what-might-have-beens for the teenager with the beautiful voice who planned to be a psychiatrist.

As an incoming freshman, she had been picked by Wingate to come early to campus — among 21 students in an academic enrichment program to help select students hit the ground running.

Arielle was one of four people in a sedan that was part of a caravan heading toward a nearby rope-climbing course, a team-building exercise that would wrap up the two-week program at the campus about 30 miles east of Charlotte.

“She was looking forward to coming home after the ropes challenge,” James Parker said, seated in the dining room of his home on West Bessemer Avenue at the edge of Fisher Park.

But the young driver of the doomed car ran a stop sign and was broadsided by the truck, police said. The 18-year-old driver, Mishawn Miller of Fayetteville, also was killed instantly in the wreck.

Two other students in the car, Marcelle Louba, 18, of Charlotte and Kendric Reid, 19, of Greencastle, Pa., survived. The driver of the farm truck suffered what other media reports said were minor injuries.

Highway Patrol officials said it appeared truck driver Carlton Watkins of Ellerbe, 52, did nothing wrong but simply didn’t see Miller’s Saturn until it was too late.

The Parker family spent Sunday afternoon surrounded by grieving family, friends and fellow members of the Church of God of Prophecy in High Point. James is youth minister there, and Djuana leads the church summer program, Camp Maranatha, where Arielle helped out the past four summers, working with the younger kids.

James Parker will never forget those awful moments Saturday morning after he looked out his front window to see two Highway Patrol officers conferring on the street.

He thought they were lost and seeking directions when they approached his door to deliver the message that is every parent’s most hideous nightmare.

“One trooper said, ‘Do you know Arielle Parker?’ And I said, ‘Yes, I’m her father,’” he said, fighting back tears. “That’s when it hit me. That’s when I said, ‘Is anything wrong with my daughter?’ ”

But what he’ll always remember happily about Arielle, James said, is her singing “Jesus, the Lamb” and “Worthy is the Lamb” at his church’s annual convention several weeks ago.

He and Djuana also will remember proudly how hard she worked as a copy editor last year on Grimsley’s yearbook staff.

And they will remember how she liked to pull the whole family together in a big group hug that reassured each one how much they were loved.

“She was the sweetest person that ever lived,” Djuana Parker said. “And she could sing just like an angel.”

Funeral arrangements are incomplete at the Hazelip Funeral Home in High Point.

Contact Taft Wireback at 373-7100 or taft.wireback@news-record.com