Lido Beach - THE photo album on the coffee table in this toy-strewn house, a souvenir of a summer wedding that kicked off what should have been a festive Fourth of July weekend in 2005, is a tear-jerker, and for all the wrong reasons. To leaf through it is to take a sentimental journey with the cruelest ending imaginable.

The album is bound in white satin, but the name stenciled in gold on its cover is not that of the bride, nor does it focus on the bride and groom. Instead, it chronicles an extroverted 7-year-old flower girl in an ivory party dress with a pink sash the color of the rose petals she tossed on the beach the day her aunt was married, a day that ended with the decapitation of the flower girl, Katie Flynn, in a grisly crash that the police say was caused by a drunken driver in a pickup truck careering north in the Meadowbrook Parkway's southbound lanes.

The driver of the pickup, Martin Heidgen, 25, of Valley Stream, is on trial in State Supreme Court in Mineola, charged with two counts of second-degree murder; besides Katie, the driver of the limousine, Stanley Rabinowitz, died in the crash that mangled -- no subtler word describes the damage inflicted on the wedding party -- Katie's father, Neil Flynn, her younger sister and fellow flower girl, Grace, and her maternal grandparents, Denise and Christopher Tangney of Long Beach.

Only Katie's mother, Jennifer Flynn, escaped with minor physical trauma; for her, it was and is the mental trauma that cripples. How else to categorize the horror of grappling through the dark, smoky wreckage in search of her first-born -- she knew her second-born, Grace, was alive because she heard her moans and whines -- and finding only Katie's severed head.