Van plunges off NY road into zoo grounds; 7 killed

VERENA DOBNIK

Asso­ci­ated Press

NEW YORK — An out-of-control van careered across sev­eral lanes of traf­fic on a high­way over­pass Sun­day, then plunged more than 50 feet off the side of the road and landed in a ravine on the grounds of the nation’s largest city zoo, killing all seven peo­ple aboard, includ­ing three chil­dren, author­i­ties said.

The van appar­ently flipped over a 4-foot-high iron fence before land­ing upside-down on the Bronx Zoo prop­erty. The cause of the crash was unclear, and police said they didn’t yet know how fast the van was trav­el­ing. A city offi­cial said the guardrail’s height would be one of the safety issues investigated.

The vic­tims were three girls, ages 3, 5 and 10, an 84-year-old man and three women, ages 80, 45 and 39, police said. The 45-year-old woman was dri­ving. The vic­tims’ names weren’t imme­di­ately released.

The van was headed south on the high­way that cuts through a working-class neigh­bor­hood when it bounced off the median, crossed all south­bound lanes and hit the guardrail, police said.

The van landed in a wooded area on the edge of zoo prop­erty that’s closed to the pub­lic and far from any ani­mal exhibits, zoo spokes­woman Mary Dixon said. The vehi­cle lay man­gled hours later, its right doors ripped off and strewn amid the trees along with items from the car. Next to the heav­ily wooded area are sub­way tracks and a train yard.

It’s not clear what caused the van to go out of con­trol. The south­bound side of the high­way was closed briefly Sun­day after­noon while police inves­ti­gated but later reopened.

The med­ical examiner’s office said it expected to release the vic­tims’ causes of death on Monday.

The acci­dent was the sec­ond in the past year where a car fell off the same stretch of the Bronx River Park­way. Last June, the dri­ver of an SUV head­ing north lost con­trol and the SUV hit a divider, bounced through two lanes of traf­fic and fell 20 feet over a guardrail, land­ing on a pickup truck in a park­ing lot. The two peo­ple in the SUV were injured.

City agen­cies will be asked to look at safety issues on the high­way includ­ing guardrail height, Bronx bor­ough Pres­i­dent Ruben Diaz Jr. said in a state­ment Sunday.

“My prayers, as well as those of my office and all Bronx­ites, go out to the fam­i­lies of the seven vic­tims,” he said.

The wreck was the dead­liest in New York City since the dri­ver of a tour bus return­ing from a Con­necti­cut casino in March 2011 lost con­trol and slammed into a pole that sheared the bus nearly end to end, killing 14 passengers.

In 2009, just north of New York City in sub­ur­ban Westch­ester County, a woman car­ry­ing a van­load of chil­dren drove nearly two miles in the wrong direc­tion on a high­way before col­lid­ing with an SUV. Eight peo­ple were killed, includ­ing four chil­dren. An autopsy deter­mined that the woman, Diane Schuler, had downed at least 10 drinks and had smoked mar­i­juana as recently as 15 min­utes before the wreck.

Posted by AP News on Apr 29 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.