SAN JOSE — The baby was due in the next two months. The young couple — each of them working jobs at Taco Bell — had already held the shower, appreciating every little gift.

The expectant mother with the long black hair and dimpled smile shared her joy on Facebook with pictures of hearts, a lock and key and a message: “Mommy to be.”

But after a tragic accident on Highway 101 early Wednesday morning, Dulce Capetillo never got the chance. She died at the hospital, but her baby boy was born. The infant was still listed in critical condition Thursday morning.

His name is Christopher, just as his mother had chosen.

“That’s all she ever wanted, was to hold her baby in her arms,” Ashley Moore, one of Dulce’s best friends, said Thursday as the heartbreaking story spread through social media.

Capetillo’s uncle, Rodrigo Hernandez, said Thursday that Christopher appears to be “doing good right now.”

“The big concern is his brain,” Hernandez said. “They want to make sure there is no brain trauma. But he looks big and healthy.”

At Valley Medical Center, her fiance, Pedro Cortes, could barely speak on Wednesday. His eyes were red and puffy as he rushed down the hallway to the neonatal unit. He became a father on Wednesday, but lost his love — the woman he planned a life with and shared playful messages with on his Facebook page.

“My baby is a cutie I love you,” Capetillo wrote.

“I love you,” he wrote back in a post last spring, when she was three months pregnant.

“I love you more,” she replied, tapping out another string of baby faces and wedding rings.

The couple who lived in East San Jose had humble jobs, taking orders, rolling Burrito Supremes, thanking customers for their business. On his Facebook page, though, Cortes called himself a “food champion at Taco Bell.” They had recently moved in together. They were planning a future.

“She was very, very lovely, very friendly, very polite,” one of her supervisors, Jose Gonzalez, said Wednesday. “She always had a smile.”

Capetillo, 18, had attended Independence High School. Her nickname on Facebook was “Dimplezz.”

Capetillo had told her friend Moore that the baby was due in October, making her seven months pregnant and the baby perhaps two months premature. Both Capetillo and Cortes were hard workers, she said, working many hours at Taco Bell. They were living with Cortes’s parents in East San Jose.

“She would say, ‘My main challenge is to provide everything for my son,” Moore said. “That was her goal — her son, her son, her son.”

“She wanted to become a wife. She wanted to have her own house,” Moore, 18, said. “She was like, I really want my baby to hurry up and come because I just can’t wait to hold him and feel him and see what he looks like. I told her I hope he looks like you.”

What exactly led to the crash is still unclear. But Capetillo had just finished her night shift after midnight Wednesday at the Taco Bell in Morgan Hill, working in the cook line or as a cashier, when her brother, Carlos Capetillo-Hernandez, 20, picked her up. The siblings were heading to pick up Cortes at the Taco Bell in San Jose’s Alum Rock neighborhood where he had finished his shift and was cleaning up, Gonzalez said.

Whether they met up with him or not is unclear. Cortes wasn’t in the Honda Civic at 1:50 a.m. when Capetillo-Hernandez swerved for an unknown reason on northbound Highway 101 just south of Tully Road and hit a BMW parked on the shoulder, according to the California Highway Patrol, (which originally reported the accident occurred on southbound 101 but corrected that Thursday).The driver of the BMW appeared drunk, CHP officers say, and it wasn’t clear whether he pulled over to sleep it off or because of a mechanical problem.

Either way, the Honda Civic smashed its front end, plowing into the parked car.

“We don’t know if he lost control or was distracted for some reason,” said CHP Officer Ross Lee. “Drugs and alcohol don’t appear to be a factor on his behalf.”

When the CHP arrived, Capetillo and her brother were alert. She complained of pains in her leg and was rushed to Valley Medical Center. Her brother Carlos Capetillo-Hernandez, 20, was taken to Regional Medical Center where he was treated for moderate internal injuries, according to Lee.

The driver of the BMW, 22-year-old Hung Tran of San Jose, was arrested on suspicion of being under the influence of alcohol and hospitalized for minor injuries, Lee said.

By Wednesday night, the shock of it all seemed too much for Cortes to comprehend. With his sister, Maria, at his side, he could say nothing more than his baby was OK

A photo of Dulce and Pedro sharing a kiss is one of the last posts on her Facebook page.

“My king my everything,” she wrote, “love of my life.”

Staff writer Mark Gomez contributed. Contact Julia Prodis Sulek at 408-278-3409. Contact Mark Gomez at 408-920-5869.