PORTSMOUTH, Va. (WAVY) — Candy Uzzle still can’t believe her husband of 34 years, Sclester, is gone.
“I’ll see him again,” Uzzle said, clinging to her faith during this hard time. “It’s just the in-between time but I’ll see him again.”
A police report states that on June 21, Sclester Uzzle Jr. was trying to turn left at the intersection of Lincoln Street and Effingham Street in Portsmouth when he was hit by a BMW that was going at least 55 mph.
Police said Uzzle was taken to the hospital, where he died from his injuries.
Candy Uzzle told 10 On Your Side she didn’t want to believe it when a detective came to her house to break the tragic news.
“For a minute, I was just like, no he couldn’t be gone,” she said. “He was 62 years old, full of life.”
She said that denial lasted up until the day of his memorial service on the 4th of July.
“I kept telling people that, knowing he wasn’t, that he was in Japan or Hawaii with the work that he did at the Navy Yard,” she said. “It was nothing for them to call because they knew Uzzle was going to get the job done. But yesterday there was no more Japan. It was real.”
Dozens of Sclester Uzzle’s coworkers from the Naval Shipyard attended the service.
Candy Uzzle said they all had wonderful things to say about her husband.
“I knew I had a diamond,” she said. “I just didn’t know I had a trillion-dollar diamond. All the love and support got me through.”
But she can’t help but feel like she’s stuck, telling me she has little information about the crash.
“That’s the frustrating part,” she said, “and his siblings need closure and they can’t get it because we don’t know anything.”
And even though she wasn’t able to speak with her husband before he died, she whispered some words to him before they closed his casket.
10 On Your Side has reached out to Portsmouth Police to see if any charges will be filed in the crash. We haven’t heard back yet.