A Long Island mother who plowed into an SUV, killing eight people in a fiery crash, drove nearly two miles in the wrong direction on a familiar highway after telling her brother she wasn’t feeling well, police said.
Diane Schuler was taking her two children and three nieces — ages 2 to 9 — home from a weekend camping trip in upstate New York before the crash on the Taconic State Parkway, the first fatal wrong-way accident on that road since 2005.
Authorities on Monday remained baffled why Schuler was driving a minivan in the wrong direction for so long on a road that a neighbor said she had driven many times before; half a dozen people called 911 to report the errant car before the accident Sunday.
A neighbor in West Babylon said the Schulers went almost every weekend to a camp in upstate Sullivan County. Diane Schuler knew the route so well she could have driven it blindfolded, said Lisa Acosta.
“I don’t understand,” said Acosta. “It’s a really, really sad thing.”
Schuler had called her brother, Warren Hance, about two hours before the accident, authorities said. He suggested that she stop driving, that he would come and get her and the children.
“She didn’t indicate specifically what was bothering her but obviously something was wrong because her brother did ask her to pull over,” said Lt. James Murphy, with the State Police’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation.
Schuler instead continued on her way, and got onto the Taconic using a northbound exit but heading south. She crossed over to get into what was the farthest left lane for northbound traffic but for her was the right lane, and drove for 1.7 miles before the collision with the northbound SUV driven by Guy Bastardi, 49, of Yonkers.
The impact sent Schuler down an embankment, where her car burst into flames. Bastardi’s SUV spun out and hit a third vehicle, whose occupants escaped serious injury.
Schuler, her 2-year-old daughter Erin and Hance’s three children — Emma, 9; Alison, 7; and Kate, 5 — were killed. Schuler’s son, Brian, 5, was hospitalized at Westchester Medical Center. At the family’s request, no information was being given out about his condition.
Bastardi was killed, as was his father Michael, an 81-year-old Korean War veteran, and family friend Daniel Longo, 74, also of Yonkers.
“They were two of the biggest, gentle giants in the world,” Jeannie Bastardi said of her father-in-law and brother-in-law. She said the father and son were among many family members involved in the auto parts business. Her father-in-law retired from an auto parts business in the Bronx and Guy Bastardi was general manager of a Westchester auto parts company.
“You couldn’t ask for two nicer people in the world,” she said. The father and son were en route to a Sunday dinner with their relatives, a longstanding family tradition, when they were killed. “Everything they did was about family. Always family. Family trips, Sunday get-togethers.”
Their funeral was scheduled for Saturday.
At the Hance home, a two-story, expanded Cape-style house in Floral Park, N.Y., a tidy Long Island neighborhood filled with stately old trees, mourners gathered on the lawn on Monday. A man with reddened eyes asked reporters for privacy. A priest arrived, and village workers put up barricades blocking off the street.
“I can’t say ‘I’m sorry’ to them yet, because I’m too upset,” said neighbor Irma Quinones, 60, a healthcare worker, who had been praying for the family.
She recalled the children playing, and the 9-year-old looking after her two younger sisters.
All three girls attended elementary school in the Floral Park-Bellerose School District, Superintendent Lynn Pombonyo said Monday. Grief counselors would be available to speak to parents and students Tuesday and continue for as long as necessary, Pombonyo said.
“All of us are very, very sad for the loss of the little girls, and our hearts go out to the family,” she said.
Schuler had worked in the corporate accounting department of Cablevision since March 1998, the company said in a statement, calling her a “beloved friend and colleague.”
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Associated Press Writer Frank Eltman on Long Island contributed to this report.
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.