Loved ones remember Denver bartender killed in wrong-way I-25 crash: "There will never be another one like her"
Loved ones of Jamie Kisting say she was the driver of the car hit by a wrong-way driver in Denver on Friday.
Kisting and one other person were killed in the crash in the northbound lanes of Interstate 25 at Sixth Avenue around 3 a.m. that day.
Kisting was a bartender at Atomic Cowboy on South Broadway. Monday night, friends, family, and coworkers gathered to remember her at the restaurant with a candlelight vigil.
Pete Aldinger met Kisting when they both worked at Atomic Cowboy about 6 years ago and said she was the glue that held the restaurant together.
"This is my favorite picture I ever took of her. Just shows her beautiful smile and her light," Aldinger said, while scrolling through photos of his best friend on his phone.
To Aldinger, Kisting was a best friend, a roommate, and a platonic life partner.
"She was just perfect. She knew how to read the room. She knew what everyone needed at any given time, her laugh, her just everything," Aldinger said.
The 29-year-old Atomic Cowboy bartender was a cat mom, plant lover, and the heart of her friend group.
"She's just a beautiful person, and there will never be another one like her," Aldinger said.
In the early morning hours of Oct. 31, Kisting texted Aldinger to say she was leaving work, and he drifted off to sleep.
The next morning, he saw a post about a nasty crash on I-25.
"I saw the news and I saw that her car wasn't in the driveway. I started making calls and putting two and two together, and her last text was sent at 2:45 and the crash happened at 2:51," Aldinger said.
Aldinger said Kisting had been heading north on I-25 for less than a mile when a car driving the wrong way hit her head-on. Both Kisting and the other driver died.
"She was my best friend, she was my rock, she was my everything, and she's gonna be sorely missed by so many people," Aldinger said, breaking into tears.
Aldinger said preventable tragedies like this are too frequent on Colorado's highways.
"The devastation, the sickness, the anger I feel with all of this is just -- this is not a one-time thing. I feel like that stretch of 25 has so many wrong-way drivers, so many bad accidents," Aldinger said. "It's absolutely an epidemic, and something needs to change. There needs to be more patrolling. There needs to be more police out on the roads, monitoring the highways late at night."
Aldinger isn't sure he can stay in the home he and Kisting shared.
"I don't know how to go forward," Aldinger said. "How do I pack her things, clear out her room, all the things we used together?"
But he knows he won't stop calling for change.
"You never think this stuff is gonna hit so close to home, and you see it every day, and it could be any one of us every day," Aldinger said. "Something needs to change. And I don't even know where to start, but something needs to change."
Denver police have not shared the name of the other driver. They said investigators have learned the at-fault driver entered the highway by driving the wrong way on Auraria Parkway. Investigators suspect impairment, but the medical examiner's office will have to determine that.