Days before their daughter was killed on Interstate 395 in Arlington, John and Sharon Ashton lost a friend of 14 years to a motorcycle crash.

Army Col. Jim Tompkins was a member of John Ashton's Saturday morning prayer group and had been riding for 30 years.

After his death the Lake Ridge couple begged their daughter, a 27-year-old Woodbridge mother, to stop riding.

But Kathryn Price Ashton told her mother the HOV lanes are safe and tried to reassure her parents that there was no need to worry.

Ashton, the mother of an 8-year-old girl, died a few days later while trying to swerve away from a cab as she entered the highway's northbound lanes. Relatives are unsure why she was headed north because she would normally be coming home at that time. They believe she might have forgotten something in her office.

She was driving her Honda at a high rate of speed and hit either the cab or a wall, said brother-in-law John Larson. She died instantly, he said.

"The motorcycle caused incredible grief from our first knowledge of her riding the cycle until she died," John Ashton wrote for a eulogy he will deliver for his daughter today at the Christ Our Lord Church in Woodbridge. "The sight of a motorcycle will always conjure up painful memories."

The Ashtons described their daughter as a wonderful mother who devoted her whole life to Laya, her daughter.

"She was a great mom," Laya said Friday afternoon at her grandparent's house. Ashton frequently took her on special trips to places like King's Dominion, just outside Richmond. "She took good care of me."

Ashton was at a difficult point, before she had Laya at age 18. After that her life's meaning changed, her father said.

As an example of her devotion to Laya, he talked about his daughter's involvement as the first activities director for their family's Nana Camp that John and Sharon Ashton run each summer for their eight grandchildren.

"She was a very patient mother," Sharon Ashton said. When Laya was 2 years old, Ashton's sister-in-law told her how she was amazed with the patience with which she taught her daughter. "She's such a fine little girl."

"Laya is the beautiful child she is because of Katie," her father wrote for the eulogy.

John Ashton is a therapist who has spent the last seven years counseling the parents of fallen firefighters. He was never able to tell those people he understood their pain. "I sadly can say that I now understand."

Ashton attended Woodbridge Senior High School then earned a Graduate Equivalency Diploma before going on to earn an Associate's Degree in liberal arts from Northern Virginia Community College. She graduated cum laude. She was recently accepted to George Mason University where she would have studied to become an elementary school teacher.

She worked as a computer specialist for Arlington-based defense contractor Anvicom.

Larson said she had a magnetism that attracted friends to her strong personality. They all said she was an adventurous free spirit who loved extreme sports, including snowboarding.

"She was very outgoing and daring," Larson said.

Ashton had been riding motorcycles for about five years and belonged to a club that races sport bikes.

"She was wild at heart," her father said.