A Sacramento-area car crash killed a UC Davis researcher and beloved grandmother
Machelle Wilson, a UC Davis statistician who approached her three children and five grandchildren with the same boundless curiosity that propelled her hard-won career in academia, was hit by a car in October and died of complications from her injuries March 24. She was 64.
Wilson had been walking her two dogs Oct. 12 in Fruitridge Pocket, not far from the home she shared with her youngest child, Azelyn Failor, 37; her son-in-law; and two of her grandchildren. The researcher was just outside Sacramento city limits shortly before 7 p.m. when she crossed 44th Street at 26th Avenue. She had nearly reached the opposite curb when a driver struck her.
Both dogs bolted, but Wilson was taken to UC Davis Medical Center. At the hospital, doctors discovered severe brain injuries. For a time, she was in a coma.
Her prognosis shifted multiple times over the next five months, which she spent in various parts of the hospital and at a long-term care facility.
Wilson showed some improvements while in treatment, and her family had desperately hoped she would regain some semblance of her former self. Then, in February, she developed a painful infection around a stent surgeons had placed in her brain — one more setback in a four-month struggle that had been agonizing for Wilson. She became much less responsive. After she developed serious pneumonia, her children decided to move her to comfort care.
UC Berkeley’s Transportation Injury Mapping System shows at least 130 people died in collisions across Sacramento County last year, and Wilson’s crash was one of at least 655 in the county that caused severe injuries. While those who die in collisions often receive some public attention, those who are severely injured are rarely acknowledged — even though the consequences are often life-altering and many people never fully recover from the crashes. Some, like Wilson, don’t even survive.
‘Car ownership is so holy in America’
On 44th Street, the county has installed speed lumps in an effort to slow down drivers. But because of the spacing, Azelyn said, motorists speed between them. UC Berkeley’s mapping shows an increase in crashes causing injuries on the road over the past 12 years. On the five blocks of 44th between Fruitridge Road and 23rd Avenue, no crashes were reported from 2013 through 2016. In addition to Wilson’s crash, five crashes since January 2017 have caused visible injuries.
The Sacramento County Coroner’s Office classified the fatal crash as a criminal incident.
But Azelyn — who was home at the time of the crash and hurried to the scene after a neighbor told her what happened — was dismayed to see that CHP officers allowed the man who hit her mother to drive off. A CHP report shows the officers planned to cite the man for speeding, driving with a suspended license and not having proof of insurance. A month after Wilson’s death, a CHP spokesperson said the agency was still investigating and had not forwarded the case to the District Attorney’s Office.
Wilson’s middle child, Tamara Failor, 42, said that investigators and first responders suggested the crash was her mother’s fault. The driver, according to the report, claimed that Wilson was on her phone when he struck her. Tamara said that would have been out of character for her mother, a career academic who had at times been a serious cyclist and was well aware of the risks of the road.
Because of the severity of Wilson’s injuries and because she was almost all the way across the street when the crash occurred, Wilson’s children believe the driver was both speeding and not paying attention. Too many pedestrians die in vehicle crashes, and Tamara said she fears people view all of those deaths — including her mother’s — as “acceptable collateral damage.”
“Car ownership is so holy in America,” Tamara said. “You always want to protect the most vulnerable road user, but it seems like there’s this opposite mentality.”
A rebellious streak led her to UC Davis
Machelle Denise “Chelly” Wilson was born Oct. 26, 1960, to Clara and Clarence Wilson. She grew up mostly in Rancho Cordova and had six sisters — Peni, Ellen, Laurie, Theresa and Carolyn — and a brother, Matthew.
Wilson had a fairly conservative upbringing in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Clara was mostly a stay-at-home mother, though she later did accounting for a local store; her father was a prison guard.
There were clues that Wilson had an iconoclastic streak even as a child. A poem she wrote as an eighth-grader — which her grandson, Cruz Marquez Failor, 14, read at her memorial April 14 — laid out her faith in her own convictions.
“You have to make your own choices not so everyone else rejoices,” Wilson wrote as a child. “But the choice you make of all the rest should be the one that suits you best.”
She had a strong sense of self, but her family’s values steered her toward a very specific path: marry young and become a devoted wife and mother.
Wilson attempted to live up to those expectations. She tested out of high school early and ultimately matriculated to Brigham Young University, where she met her future husband. She graduated with a degree in the humanities, married Bruce Failor, and had her first child, Samuel, at 20. At 22, she gave birth to Tamara. Azelyn was born when she was 26.
But she couldn’t set aside her interest in higher education, and she enrolled in community college while raising her kids. Tamara remembered her mom bringing her to campus for a biology class on a day that the students were dissecting fetal pigs.
Although the young mother always doted on her children, her life as a wife wasn’t working: She wanted a Ph.D. In 1990, she left her husband and, after they both moved to the Bay Area she enrolled in UC Davis’ ecology program. She commuted back and forth, working toward a master’s degree in statistics and later a Ph.D. in ecology while co-parenting three children in Albany.
An unusual career provided a map
Peni Wilson, the oldest of the sisters, noted that Wilson was the first in their family to go to college. Her other sisters followed suit: Peni studied design and is now a small business owner; several went to nursing school.
“She kind of set an example for us,” Peni said.
“She had a yearning to explore the world,” said one of her best friends, Jennifer Wood. The pair met as UC Davis graduate students: Wilson did research into using satellite imagery to get information about crops, and Wood studied soil science.
They bonded over their shared field, ecology, over high-minded discussions over “politics, society and the universe” as well as the more immediate anxieties of grad school on their walks between the cafeteria and the mycorrhizae lab in Hoagland Hall.
“She had this desire to have the world be a better place,” Wood said. Wilson saw her work as part of that: Through statistics, she was “trying to get at the truth of things.”
Even while toiling away in grad school, she still found the time to take an interest in her children’s interests. Once, Wilson accompanied Tamara to a Bush concert at the Shoreline Amphitheatre in the middle of finals season.
But her children appreciated her independence, too. She had not only sought a divorce and forged a path in academia for herself, but she had also renounced the Mormon church.
On the whole, Samuel, now 43, said, “She taught us to be intellectual — to question widely-held assumptions and think critically.” She fostered “intellectual contestation,” Tamara said; Samuel laughed as he remembered arguing with his mother about modern monetary theory.
“She definitely created a different life for us than what she had for herself,” said Tamara. “She had to forge a way for herself.”
It took her eight years, but she got that Ph.D.
An academic and a grandmother
Wilson’s career took her far from California. She spent several years as an assistant professor at the University of Georgia’s Savannah River Ecology Laboratory; she was a visiting assistant professor at the University of Montana and then the University of Florida. In 2008, she moved to Barranquilla, Colombia, where she was a professor of statistics at the Universidad del Norte.
She spent three years in the city on Colombia’s Caribbean coast, teaching high-level math in Spanish and scuba diving in her free time. But after she learned that she would become a grandmother, she decided to move back to California to be near Azelyn and the baby, Cruz. She wanted to be there, to be present, to read to them, to tell them the names of native wildflowers.
Wilson reached out to her grad school mentor, David Rocke, a professor of biostatistics at UC Davis. Serendipitously, Rocke was staffing a new team of biostatisticians at the School of Medicine. He hired Wilson, who moved back to Sacramento.
By moving back to California, Wilson was trying to root herself and create a center point for her family.
For around two years, Wilson shared a home with Azelyn, Cruz Marquez, and their two children, Cruz, 14, and Izel, 13. Azelyn said it was difficult to tell how the kids were coping with their grandmother’s death: The crash was so sudden, and it was difficult even for Azelyn to believe what had happened.
“I think it’s, on some level, kind of surreal for all of us,” she said. Samuel lives in the U.K., and Wilson “would go and visit Sam for a while here and there. Part of me was just like, ‘Oh, she’s on another trip.’”
Wilson saw them less frequently because they live abroad, but she loved visits with Tamara’s daughter, Nineveh, 6, and Samuel’s daughters, Rosalind, 9, and Elodie, 4.
Azelyn hoped the county would take more evidence-based steps to reduce car speeds.
“What actually slows people down?” she asked. “You have to make it feel uncomfortable to go fast.”
She still lives near the intersection with her kids and she still walks through that intersection sometimes. Every time, it brings her back to the day that would end the life Wilson made for herself, full of fascinating work and grandchildren who delighted her.
No matter their ages, Wilson took children’s intellectual curiosity seriously. Tamara remembered listening to her mother engaging in an in-depth conversation about lunar phases with Nineveh, the little girl learning the term “quarter moon.”
This story was originally published April 23, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
