US News

BQE TRUCKER DIES DESPITE CRASH VICTIM’S HEROICS

Despite burns and bruises, lifeguard David Cabrol squeezed out of his crushed, burning car and tried desperately to save the life of the truck driver who had smashed into him early yesterday.

Cabrol, whose car was demolished when the truck spun out of control on the Brooklyn side of the Kosciuszko Bridge, recalled first trying to calm a fellow motorist, whose car was also hit, then helping drag trucker Julio Mora from the blaze.

But the Long Island resident was already dead, cops said.

“I thought it was a gas truck, and there were flames everywhere,” Cabrol, 38, said from his bed at Bellevue Hospital. “I saw the driver lying in the road, and I thought, ‘I gotta get him away from the flames.’

“I’m not a hero,” he added. “I did what anybody else would do – I tried to help the guy.”

Cabrol, a Brooklynite who works at a Manhattan health club, and two other motorists pulled Mora away. But cops said Mora was killed when he was hurled through his windshield by the force of the crash.

Sources said the truck, carrying concrete, blew a tire on the eastbound Brooklyn-Queens Expressway at 5:45 a.m. and swerved across the road, sending Cabrol’s car into the center divider and hitting another vehicle.

Cops identified the second car’s driver as Shawney Chow, 25, of Brooklyn. He was treated at Bellevue and released.

“I can’t believe I made it out alive,” he said. “I was in the middle, surrounded by fire.”

Additional reporting by John Doyle and Lorena Mongelli