An 11-year-old Chelsea girl on her way to a slumber party in the Bronx was killed on the West Side Highway when the car she was riding in flipped over because the driver reportedly was drunk.
Leandra Rosado was pronounced dead at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center shortly after 2 a.m. The other passengers' injuries were not life-threatening, the New York Times reported.
The driver, Carmen Huertas, 31, of the Bronx, was charged with vehicular manslaughter and drunken driving, the paper reported. Huertas slammed her 1998 Mercury Sable into a guardrail near the 96th Street exit of the Henry Hudson Parkway shortly before 1 a.m. and flipped the car, police said.
Lenny Rosado raised his only child as a single parent since she was 4-years-old. He could not bring himself to identify her body.
"My daughter's my best friend," Rosado told the Daily News. "She's my partner in crime, she was my life, my joy."
Leandra, a sixth-grade student at Greenwich Village Middle School, wanted to be a veterinarian or a singer when she grew up, her father said.
Rosado told the Post that Huertas did not seem drunk when he dropped his daughter off at the home on West 20th Street. Her daughter, Brittany Gonzales, was a classmate of Rosado. Huertas had been drinking at a party at her ex-husband's home before the accident, the paper reported.
"You put all those kids in danger. You put other people in danger. You're taking other people's lives into your own hands. You don't have the right," Rosado told the Post.
Huertas was driving 18 miles over the speed limit and had a blood alcohol level 1 1/2 times the legal limit, according to the Post. Before heading to the Bronx, Huertas reportedly joked about being drunk and asked the girls to raise their hands if they thought something was going to happen, said Lisa Vazquez, whose 14-year-old daughter Amanda was riding in the car, to the Daily News.
Huertas' family said the woman was distraught and wanted to kill herself, the Post reported.
"My sister is a good mother, and these parents wouldn't let her take the children home if she wasn't. She's not a monster. She's not an alcoholic," said Huertas sister Yolanda Velez, 38.
"My daughter died too soon," Leandra's mom, Joida Quinones, told the Post, "and she wouldn't have died if that woman hadn't been drinking and driving,"
