A Greenfield family of four was killed late Thursday night when a passenger bus slammed into a line of cars on Interstate 95 in Virginia, turning a trip to a wedding in South Carolina into a mass-casualty crash. Dmitri Doncev, his wife, Ecaterina, and their two children, Emily and Mark, died in the wreck, along with a woman from Worcester who was in a separate vehicle.

The deaths have cut straight through a church community that knew the Doncevs as fixtures of Sunday life, and the family’s name is now being carried by relatives who spent Saturday telling the same story in different ways: they were close, faithful and always helping. The crash is the kind of event that sends a local family obituary into a regional traffic tragedy, which is why people in Greenfield are searching for answers now and why the cause remains so important.

Dmitri, who worked as a nurse at Holyoke Medical Center, and Ecaterina moved to Greenfield from Moldova in 2008. By then, they were already part of the Greenfield Russian Baptist Church, where Ecaterina organized church events and volunteered in the kitchen, and Dmitri pitched in with renovations whenever he was not working. Anatoliy Bublik said she ran the New Year’s events and women’s activities, while he was always there when something needed to be fixed.

Carolina Bublik said the family gathered every Sunday after church and that there was not a week when they did not sit together afterward. She said next Sunday will be especially hard because the Doncevs will not be at the lunch table. Carolina also called Emily and Mark their two miracles, saying Mark was born at 26 weeks after years of prayer. Emily, 14, played the piano and was a straight-A student; Mark, 7, was remembered as an outdoorsy boy who loved games. At the family home on Willow Street, a sign read, “Jesus is my savior.”

What still has not been answered is why the bus careened into the line of cars. Authorities had not released the identity of the Worcester woman by Saturday morning, and the missing explanation is now the center of the story for a town that already knows the names of everyone it lost.