A teen driver and a passenger on a Long Island road died early yesterday when he attempted to cut in front of his brother in another car, Suffolk County cops said.
Ray Vega, 18, in a 1996 Honda, sideswiped his 19-year-old brother Kevin’s Pontiac Grand Am on Walt Whitman Road in Melville and lost control of his vehicle at 1:14 a.m., police said.
The Honda knocked over a 30 mile per hour sign and the teen and his passenger Carmen Rivera-Gotay, 17, died in the wreck.
A loud thud woke Elizabeth Castellano, 35, who lives near the scene of the accident.
“It sounded like something hit a brick wall — a thud, a boom. When I saw the car this morning, I couldn’t believe it. It was ripped in half. I can’t imagine people were inside it,” said Castellano.
She went outside to see what happened and saw a shaken teen, presumably talking to police on his cell phone.
“The poor kid sat over here at the end of our driveway. He was kind of in shock. I heard him say on the phone, ‘There’s a boy and girl in the car!’ He sounded frantic and scared,” she said.
But speeding was not unusual on the busy stretch, which she called “dangerous” despite its speed warnings.
“People speed morning, noon and night. People think its a freeway,” she said.
“It’s unfortunate those kids had to die,” said Castellano.
Relatives of Rivera-Gotay, 17, who was about to enter her senior year in high school, were devastated.
She was coming home from Dave and Busters with pals the Vega brothers and Isaias Perez, who rode in the older brother’s car, her aunt Tina Gotay, 39, said.
“She was just a good kid. She liked to draw, she played the violin. She wanted to go to college for psychology,” she said.
“It was two kids being reckless,” said Gotay, shaking her head and fighting back tears. “They were just kids in a car, being stupid.”
Gotay said her sister Amber is distraught. “They shared a room for 17 years together.”
“It’s all a cliche,” her uncle Ryan Gotay, 39, added. “She was a good kid, well liked, took care of her mom, had a lot of friends, very responsible. She was a good artist, did a lot of drawings.”