The news cycle has passed, the memorials have been held, and the condolences have trailed off.
But for Vanessa Scimone, the tears of sorrow still fall like an eternal spring.
Her son, Nicolas Scimone, 22, was killed in a motorcycle accident on Aug. 28 in St. Augustine less than 20 hours after he’d seen his mother.
Another driver turning onto Ponce De Leon Boulevard struck him as he drove southbound a little before 3 p.m., Vanessa told The Citizen.
The aspiring lineman, who was engaged to be married, had spontaneously visited his mother Aug. 27 the day of her birthday.
Vanessa was at her cosmetology school when Nicolas’ number popped up on her phone.
“Are you home, mom?” he asked.
“No, I’ll be back later after school,” Vanessa replied.
“Okay,” he responded. “I’m going to wait for you at your house until you get home. I want to wish you a happy birthday.”
Vanessa was touched — and pleasantly surprised by the gesture. Her children, she said, would reliably call or text her well wishes on the occasion. But in-person visits from Nicolas and his brothers, Anthony and Brian Scimone, were becoming increasingly rare as they got older.
She arrived at her Hastings home, and there was Nicolas waiting for her, standing proudly next to the Triumph motorcycle he bought earlier in the year.
He hugged his mom and gave her a kiss. Nicolas was giddy with excitement over his imminent wedding to Alyssa Howard, and told his mom that he had secured the loan necessary to attend lineman school.
Her little boy, she thought to herself, was growing up. “I hugged him,” she told The Citizen. “I kissed him. I told him I loved him. That was the last moment I had with him.”
Given what took place mere 20 hours later, she believes the unexpected visit was guided by a divine hand. “I think God was shining down on him,” she said.
The following day, her phone pinged. She could see that the message came from her family’s group chat. It was a photo of a toppled red motorcycle that had been posted to a local Facebook page.
“Is that Nick’s bike?” a relative asked. Vanessa’s stomach seized up, but she didn’t see the saddlebags he’d just bought attached to the sides.
“You go straight into denial,” she said. “I told them that it wasn’t him. But somewhere I probably knew.”
Hours passed without word from law enforcement, and she couldn’t reach him on his phone. Vanessa drove to his home in St. Augustine that evening where he should have been at that hour– but he wasn’t there.
“That’s when I knew,” she said. “My niece called me and told me the police were at my house and wanted to speak to me.”
She learned on Facebook that a nurse had witnessed the accident and rushed to perform chest compressions on her son as he lay dying in the street.
The woman later told Vanessa that she had a brother named Nicholas who died of cancer not long ago.
“I just thanked her as a mother for being there with Nick when I couldn’t be,” Vanessa said of their conversation. “I was worried that he suffered. But she told me she didn’t think he did.”
In the midst of her grief, Vanessa was still saddled with logistical concerns surrounding his burial and memorial. His father, John Scimone, passed away in 2018.
She called his fiancee on the off chance that the couple had discussed their end-of-life wishes with each other.
To Vanessa’s surprise, they had.
Nicolas told Alyssa that he wanted to be cremated and buried underneath his favorite tree, a Norfolk Island Pine sapling.
“They said that as the saplings grow, then they would grow together,” she said.
Nicolas’ friends and family all plan to obtain the small trees and place some of his ashes at their base.
His burial wishes reflected his love of the outdoors. Nicolas, she said, always wanted to be outside — whether it was in the woods or on the beach.
“He was a spur of the moment, live life in the moment kind of kid,” she said.
But he was eager to settle down with Alyssa, who he when they attended Pedro Menendez High School together. They wanted at least four kids and they had picked out their names already.
“It’s sad to think about these things that will never happen,” she said tearfully.
On Sept. 7, they had a celebration of life for Nicolas and a local motorcycle club held a memorial ride. Vanessa joined on the back of her partner’s bike. It was difficult, she said, to revisit the scene of his death. “You can see an imprint of where he was and that alone was very hard,” she said.
But for her son, Vanessa is pressing forward with her dreams of opening her own salon.
“The day before he died, I told him what the name of the salon was going to be, what the colors are going to be,” she said. “Sometimes I think about another name, but I can’t change it now. Because that’s what I told him it was going to be.”
