NY Times
July 28, 2005
6 People From Dance Camp Are Killed in Crash in Catskills
By MICHELLE O'DONNELL
A Dodge Neon ferrying a group of young people from a dance camp along a rural highway in the Catskills veered into oncoming traffic shortly before noon yesterday and slammed into a dump truck, killing all six of the car's occupants instantly, the authorities said. The driver of the dump truck was slightly injured.
"The only word you could use is horrific," said Stephen Lungen, the district attorney for Sullivan County.
The car was being driven by a counselor from the Atlanta Dance Camp in South Fallsburg, N.Y., who was bringing the others to a nearby lake to go swimming, teenage counselors at the camp said last night.
The camp is owned by a woman from Brooklyn, Anna Kapitannikova, whose 16-year-old son, Ilya, a dancer, was among the dead, they said.
The small Neon, whose occupants ranged in age from 7 to 25, was "totally destroyed, totally torn apart," Mr. Lungen said.
The accident occurred on State Route 17B, a two-lane highway with a 55-mile-per-hour speed limit, in Mongaup Valley, about five miles west of Monticello and about 80 miles northwest of New York City.
Jeremiah Forshay, a construction worker who was working on a house along the road, said he saw the gray Neon traveling west at what he estimated to be 95 to 100 miles an hour, passing several cars.
A temporary passing lane ended and the Neon, which he said was driven by a woman in her 20's, bobbed into the eastbound lane to pass another vehicle, Mr. Forshay said. But, to his horror, it had not completed the pass when it slammed into the dump truck, which rolled right over the car.
"It looked like a war zone," Mr. Forshay said last night, crying. "I could barely recognize if the bodies were male or female."
The loud collision sent the truck skidding off the road into the fence of the nearby Be'rr Hatorah Bungalows, a small summertime vacation community for Hasidic families, startling women and children at a swimming pool on the other side of the fence. None were injured, said Sury Gross, who was at the pool.
An emergency medical technician who is stationed at the bungalows ran to the car, but "unfortunately, there was nothing he could do," Mrs. Gross said.
"It was like a piece of paper," she added.
According to Mr. Lungen, the driver of the dump truck, which sat on tandem wheels and was from the county's Department of Public Works, had done everything in his power to avoid being struck. "The Neon was, preliminarily, operating erratically and too fast," said Mr. Lungen, who went to the scene. The dump-truck driver "moved to the right, but there was nothing he could do to avoid the car."
The crash horrified those who saw it - Mr. Lungen said it was the worst he had ever seen. Yet the real horror was borne by family members of the victims, many of them who spoke only Russian speakers and were summoned to Sullivan County from their homes in Brooklyn and New Jersey by hasty phone calls to face officials who had a hard time finding the words to explain what had happened.
Last night, family members keened loudly outside the county morgue at the Community General Hospital in nearby Harris, their sobs echoing in the dark mountain stillness, occasionally punctuated by a desperate monologue into a cellphone.
Among the loudest cries were those of a Russian-speaking father of one girl had been told to drive to the hospital to pick up his daughter. Only after he had arrived did he learn that she was dead.
Lyudmila Golovunin sobbed uncontrollably as her friend Stacey Rudoy said quietly that Ms. Golovunin, a single mother, had moved with her son, Igor, to the United States from Russia two years ago, settling in Brooklyn. She wanted only to give Igor, 16 and among those killed, a better life and a better education, Ms. Rudoy said.
Regina Fishman, the aunt of another victim, 14-year-old Marcia Fishman of Edison, N.J., said that her niece was a lovely girl whose parents had sent her to camp because they had wanted her to have "a good summer."
"She was such a beautiful, sweet girl," Ms. Fishman said.
At the dance camp, a small open-air outpost with a pool, counselors said that Ms. Kapitannikova, the owner, was so distraught by the accident and her son's death that she was hospitalized yesterday.
Between May and December, the Sullivan County population swells to about 250,000 from about 75,000, Mr. Lungen said.
With the higher numbers of people - many of whom are unfamiliar with the roads - come more traffic hazards. Between June and August last year, about 20 people were killed in car accidents on county roads, Mr. Lungen said.
Last night at the dance camp, children and teenagers could be seen wandering around, some crying. As a reporter walked toward the camp, a man rushed toward the gate.
"I'm sorry, I cannot talk to you; I do not have any time," the man said. He strode inside toward a boy of about 8, whom he swept into his arms and clutched tightly.
Samme Chittum, in Mongaup Valley, N.Y., contributed reporting for this article.
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