For Sonya Mewbourn, the death of her only child, Joshua Kaleb Mewbourn, is as painful now as it was five years ago.

“The pain is just as deep,” she said. “It never dulls. It’s just a very deep, aching wound that does not heal. You learn to take one step at a time.”

Friday morning, the day after the fifth anniversary of Kaleb’s death, 11th-graders at Holly Pond High School released balloons in memory of their would-be classmate. Mewbourn said attending the event made her realize how many things have changed since her son’s death.

“When they did the balloon release, there were a lot of them out there that I hadn’t seen in a while,” she said. “It was like looking at completely different children and it makes me wonder, how tall would he be? What would he look like?”

Kaleb Mewbourn, 11, and April Melinda Glover, 21, died in a traffic accident on U.S. Highway 278 East in Berlin on Sept. 28, 2001. James Randall Bailey, 23, of Cullman, received three consecutive life sentences in Nov. 2002, after being convicted on two counts of manslaughter and one count of first-degree assault in connection with the fatal crash.

According to testimony, Bailey and Glover were traveling north on County Road 747 in a 2001 Dodge Neon driven by Bailey, when their vehicle ran a stop sign and collided with a 1993 Ford truck driven by Kaleb’s father, Bobby Mewbourn, who was traveling east on Highway 278. Kaleb was pronounced dead at the scene, and Glover died at Cullman Regional Medical Center from internal injuries. Bailey and Bobby Mewbourn were airlifted to hospitals in Birmingham.

Bailey was originally charged with murder, and was also charged with first-degree assault stemming from injuries sustained by Bobby Mewbourn. According to Jack Kalin, a forensic toxicologist with the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences, Bailey tested positive for the presence of methamphetamine, amphetamine and marijuana in blood and urine samples taken shortly after the crash.

Mewbourn said after students released balloons in Kaleb’s memory with attached contact information in 2002, she received about 12 letters, including one from college students from the University of Florida who discovered one of the notes while backpacking in the Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest in North Carolina. Another of the letters came from a five-man team who had been searching for a rare plant just west of Soddy, Tenn.

Letters also came from Virginia and Decatur, Tenn.

Mewbourn said she relied on her faith in God to get through the difficult times after Kaleb’s death and nearly a year later when a tornado wiped out all of her family’s possessions, including many photos of Kaleb.

She said at times, keeping her faith was difficult. The day of Kaleb’s funeral, her husband, Bobby Mewbourn, remained in the hospital with only a three percent chance of survival because of injuries suffered during the crash.

“I was in total shock,” she said. “I’m burying my child, my husband is on life support at UAB… It was just unbelievable. I told my pastor, ‘I can’t pray. You’re going to have to pray for me, and please, pray that I can pray again. I felt like I was going out of my mind.”

Though she said she doesn’t feel the anger she used to, she will never get over Kaleb’s death.

“My husband and I went through stages of deep anger and lots of frustration,” she said. “I’m past the anger, but I just feel like it’s not fair. He was an excellent child, a straight-A student. He was excellent at everything he did.”