CRUEL FATE: Shiv Totaran (left) was too big to fit in the back seat where his friend Anil Persaud was killed.
SENSELESS: A highway cop yesterday inspects the wreckage of a car from which teen parents were ejected and died on the Grand Central Parkway. (Seth Gottfried)
At the moment of impact, all he could do was pray, a survivor of a boozy, high-speed Grand Central Parkway accident told The Post yesterday.
“I started praying, ‘God, don’t let me die tonight,’ ” Shiv Totaran, 19, said of bracing himself in the front passenger seat as the car hit a guardrail and spun out of control, ejecting and killing the teen parents of an infant girl, who were in the back seat.
The driver, Madosh Hansraj, 20 — who escaped without a scratch — had been drinking and was going more than 100 mph when he crashed his 1996 Honda near Utopia Parkway yesterday at 3:50 a.m., cops said.
He has been charged with two counts of manslaughter, two counts of criminally negligent homicide, felony assault, speeding and driving while impaired.
A sobbing Hansraj was arraigned in Queens Criminal Court late last night and his bail was set at $250,000.
Hansraj blew a .072 on a breath test, which is just under the legal limit of .08, prosecutors said.
“This was a tragic, tragic accident. Mashod is very sorrowful,” defense lawyer David D. Strachan said.
“His best friend is dead. His best friend’s girlfriend is dead. And another good friend is in the hospital.”
The six pals piled into the car after a night of drinking and playing pool at Side Pockets on Lefferts Boulevard.
When the car crashed, three of the four passengers, in the back seat, were catapulted out the car’s back windows.
Two of the victims, high school senior Meera “Jestina” Dukharan, 17, and Anil Persaud, 18, died instantly, leaving behind a 14-month-old daughter, Meya.
A third passenger, Brian George, 17 , remains in serious condition at New York Hospital of Queens. He has a severe head gash and his back was torn up from being scraped along the concrete, Totaran said.
“I looked across the street and I saw two bodies lying there,” Totaran said of finding the tragic couple. “I ran over to them . . . I turned Jestina over. I realized she was dead. When they put the white sheet on her, it was over.”
Totaran still can’t come to grips with the carnage he witnessed.
“Words cannot explain it,” Totaran told The Post.
Totaran, physically the largest of the friends, had originally been sitting in the back seat — from where the new dad, his friend, would be ejected onto the highway.
But Totaran couldn’t squeeze his larger girth into the back seat, he explained as he left the hospital after being treated for minor injuries. Instead, Persaud, his friend from childhood — nicknamed “Nil” — took his place.
“When we got outside [of the pool hall] Nil was just joking around . . . we were play-fighting and slap-boxing,” Totaran said.
The tragic dad’s sister, Nalini, 32, burst into tears at the family’s Hollis home, mourning for her brother.
“He was very good to his girlfriend. He loved her very much,” she said.
The pair knew the driver from Van Buren HS in Queens, she said.
Hansraj’s dad, Roy Hansraj, 55, said: “He would go all out for his family and friends. He is good and loving. He is always there,”
Additional reporting by Kathryn Cusma, Candace Amos and Candice M. Giove