19-year-old woman killed in NYC moped crash sought to live in the moment: twin sister
The 19-year-old woman who was one of the two teens killed when their moped crashed on the Cross Island Parkway lived in the moment in a race against time, the victim’s grieving twin sister said Sunday.
Fatal victim Giselle Flores was supposed to just get a ride home early Saturday and meet up with her twin, Sharick Flores, later that day for a weekend together. But she never made it home.
Instead, she was pronounced dead on the Queens highway when the 15-year-old boy she was riding with lost control of the two-wheeler.
In the hour leading up to the crash, Giselle, who was out with a friend of the twins, called her sister.
“I was like, ‘What are you doing still out?’ She said, ‘Don’t worry, I’m getting some friends to pick me up. I’ll go home and I’ll see you at 5 in the morning,’” Sharick told The Post. “And she never got home.
“When motorcycles came to pick her up, she told my best friend, ‘You know what, get on. Let’s go for a ride. We only live once.’”
Giselle, who lived in Queens, and the friend jumped on separate mopeds. Giselle went with teen Andy Rodriguez, whom she just met that night, the sister said.
As Rodriguez navigated the highway around 2 a.m., he lost control and hit a car that ricocheted the pair into a highway wall near 150th Street, Sharick said she was told by the friend.
The boy whom the friend was riding with dropped her off on the side of the road to scoop up Rodriguez and rush him to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
Meanwhile, the friend called Sharick in a panic while Giselle lay lifeless.
“’She doesn’t move, she doesn’t breathe. She’s bleeding. I don’t know what to do.’ I said, ‘Bro, call 911,’ but they’d already called 911,” Sharick recalled. “I ended up going to the emergency room to see her, and they told me my sister was dead.
“I ended up seeing my best friend who was covered in my sister’s blood — her legs, her shoes. She said, ‘I tried to wake her up and she didn’t wake up.’”
Sharick said their mother is “so devastated” as the family is raising money for funeral costs.
Sharick called her sister “more than my best friend.” The pair dreamed of going to college together after Giselle wrapped up high school in November.
“She was my whole world. Me and my sister have been through a lot,” Sharick said. “We have the same mentality. We think alike. We actually wanted to go to college for the same thing, to study medicine. She was going to be a nurse and I was going to be an ultrasound tech.”
But Sharick also noted her sister “always knew that this was going to happen because she had this mentality of ‘We only live once.’”
Sharick, who lives upstate, was supposed to drive down to Queens to pick up her sister and bring her back up north so the siblings could spend a weekend together.
“She said, ‘You know what? We’re going to go on jet skis, we’re going to go shopping, we’re going to do this and that,’” Sharick said.
“I told her, ‘Relax, girl,’ and she said, ‘No, baby, we’re going to do all of this because what if I die tomorrow?’ Her mentality was always, what if we die? We have to live for today.”
The investigation into the fatal crash is ongoing and no arrests have been made.
