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“The skid marks and debris … it is so sad,” said the photographer, Mary Elizabeth Grubbs.
YOU READ IT HERE FIRST: A road rage incident between two drivers speeding up the Garden State Parkway this morning led to a pair of crashes near Exit 168 in Washington Township that killed a 63-year-old Teaneck woman who was ejected from one of the vehicles and put both men in jail, NJ State Police said. READ MORE….
The incident between Thomas J. Vanderweit, 27, of Saddle Brook, and John C. Emili, a 21-year-old power weight-lifter and former Clarkstown North High School football player from New City, N.Y., began near the Route 17 exit around 10:45 Sunday morning, Trooper Christopher Kay told CLIFFVIEW PILOT.
Several witnesses told police both vehicles were being operated erratically, “making numerous lane changes, tailgating and travelling in excess of the posted speed limit,” Kay said.
Emili, who was tailgating
Vanderweit’s 2007 Chevy Trail Blazer with his 2004 Honda Pilot, tried passing him on the exit lane for 168 and lost control of the vehicle, the trooper told CLIFFVIEW PILOT. TOP: CLIFFVIEW PILOT photo by Mary Elizabeth Grubbs; BOTTOM: Thomas J. Vanderweit, his Chevy truckThe Pilot careened off the road, hit a guardrail and then hurtled back onto the Parkway, where it overturned and rammed into the side of the Blazer, which left the roadway itself and smashed a guardrail, Kay said.
Annetta Billingy, 63, of Teaneck, an unrestrained rear passenger in Emili’s Honda was ejected, he said.
A North Star Medi-Vac helicopter landed at the exit ramp and took the woman to Hackensack University Medical Center, where she was pronounced dead, Kay said.
The parkway was closed when the helicopter was brought in around 11:15 a.m.
Both men are being held on $100,000 bail each in the Bergen County Jail, charaged with vehicular homicide.
Kay singled out the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office’s Fatal Accident Unit for its work on the investigation.
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