Wilmington woman mourns fiancé killed in road rage incident

WILMINGTON, Del. , Chelsea Cooke is preparing to bury the man she spent the last 12 years building a life with after police said he was shot and killed Sunday morning in front of their Wilmington home in what investigators have called a road-rage attack.

The victim, 32-year-old Donald “Donnie” Nave, was killed by 31-year-old Hector Sanchez, according to New Castle County police. Cooke said she and Nave had just pulled up to their house on South Cleveland Avenue when Sanchez ran up behind him, with their son standing nearby.

“With me and my son near the car, he did not care. He came at 8:30 in the morning, no tints, no mask, no nothing,” Cooke said.

Cooke said the killing grew out of a road-rage incident in August and that Sanchez had been harassing Nave in the days before the shooting.

“You’re a weirdo out here taking somebody’s son and loved one because you can’t control yourself. It’s insane,” Cooke said.

Nave and Cooke shared two children, with a third on the way.

“You never think it’s going…I never thought this would be me. It was so stupid – over nothing,” Cooke said.

Investigators used license-plate reader technology to quickly identify Sanchez’s vehicle and took him into custody Sunday evening.

“It was an overwhelming feeling that they caught him. It was,” Cooke said.

Sanchez remains in custody facing first-degree murder charges.

“I can’t wait to see him under the jail,” Cooke said.

Cooke described Nave as a hard worker, a family man and the center of her life.

“He was everything to me. Everything. I couldn’t ask for a better partner. He was imperfectly perfect,” she said.

Her grief deepened the same day when her grandfather also died.

“I lost my grand pop the same day. So, I lost two of the most important men in my whole entire life in the same day, but I gained two angels,” Cooke said.

Nave is scheduled to be laid to rest Tuesday, leaving Cooke to raise their two children and the baby on the way without the family man she called imperfectly perfect.

“It feels like a dream that I’m not waking up from,” she said.