Four passengers are dead after a car drove into a creek in Queens, New York on Friday. The driver of the vehicle, the fifth passenger, is the only one who survived, police told the New York Daily News.
The passengers, all friends, were traveling home from a birthday party when the car charged through a chain-link fence and rolled over into the Steinway Creek near 19th Avenue and 37th Street.
The driver was able to swim to land and call 911, but by the time emergency responders arrived it was too late, the Daily News reported.
The victims were trapped inside the car for over thirty minutes after the driver called 911 at around 10:36 p.m.
First responders, including a team of 65 firefighters and NYPD divers, pulled out the bodies of two men and two women from the water-submerged car.
"They were pulling out one person at a time and rolling them down the street to an awaiting ambulance," a witness told the Daily News. "Paramedics were sitting on top of one of them performing CPR as they were being rolled out."
The victims have been identified as 21-year-old Darius Fletcher, 19-year-old Crystal Gravely, 20-year-old Jaleel Furtado and 19-year-old Jada Monique Butts.
One male and two of the female passengers were pronounced dead after they were rushed to Elmhurst Hospital. The other male victim was pronounced dead at Mount Sinai Queens hospital, the Daily News reported.
The driver was taken to Elmhurst Hospital to receive treatment for Hypothermia.
The friends were returning from celebrating the 19th birthday of a female passenger, though it is not clear whose birthday they were celebrating, the Daily News reported.
"He wasn't driving, it wasn't his car," a woman at Elmhurst who identified herself as Furtado's mother said while crying, the newspaper reported. "He was with friends. They were supposed to be going to some restaurant for their friend's birthday."
The cause of the accident has not been determined. Police say that alcohol was not involved, the Daily News reported.
