Mother Killed, Teen Daughter Hurt After Driver Cuts Off SUV In Bronx
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) -- Police are searching for the driver they say caused a mother to crash on I-95 on Saturday night as she was driving home from a school play.
Her daughter has been released from the hospital. WLNY 10/55's Ali Bauman spoke with the distraught family on Sunday night.
Michelle Muccio, 44, and her 16-year-old daughter, Francesa, had just marched together in the St. Patrick's Day Parade with their cheerleading squad before they went to Cardinal Spellman High School in the Bronx to sell refreshments at the school play. On the drive home another car cut them off and cut the mother's life short.
"She kept this family together and now we don't have anything. We have nothing anymore," father-in-law Domenick Muccio said.
Police said Michelle Muccio was driving with her daughter southbound on I-95 just before midnight when a car cut in front of them by Bartow Avenue. Muccio instinctively turned her wheel to avoid a crash.
"She turned it so hard the SUV, Suburban rolled over four or five times," Domenick Muccio said.
Domenick Muccio said his granddaughter remembers her mother rolling on top of her as the car flipped near the exit ramp.
"She just looked at her mother and she had blood on her face and was unresponsive and she crawled out of the car and had the intuition to get her mother's phone and call her dad," Domenick Muccio said.
Family and emergency responders rushed to the gruesome scene and took the daughter to a nearby hospital. She has just minor injuries.
"She says 'how's my mom, because she didn't look good,'" Domenick Muccio said.
"A mess. It was a mess. They had to use the jaws of life to get her off. They cut the whole ceiling off. It was a minivan. They cut the whole ceiling off and they still couldn't get her out," Baychester employee Raymond Vega said.
Family members gathered Sunday to mourn the mother of three and longtime cheerleading coach at her daughter's high school, who had just marched with the squad in the holiday parade hours before her death.
"There wasn't a woman like this. There wasn't," Domenick Muccio said.
What pains her loved ones even more is the fact that police said the other driver never stopped.
"You would think that car after doing something like that ... if I cut you off and the car is right here and the car turns over you'd hear something and look in the rear-view mirror," Domenick Muccio said.
The daughter was home Sunday night recovering physically and emotionally. The school's athletic director said Michelle Muccio came to every competition and football game with homemade baked goods. And it is nearly impossibly to imagine the cheer program without her, Bauman reported.
