Anndel Taylor, a 22-year-old girl, died waiting for help after several calls to 911, after being trapped in her car for at least 18 hours in the middle of the storm that hit upstate New York on Christmas weekend.
Taylor was one of at least 28 people killed in New York in what Gov. Kathy Hochul called “the blizzard of the century” after she was trapped driving home from work in Buffalo on Friday afternoon.
While trapped, she shared a series of videos with her sisters in North Carolina. The latest, just after midnight on Friday, showed her rolling down an ice-covered window to reveal a nearby van that was also stuck with its hazard lights on, the New York Post reported.
Her family believes Taylor was trapped in her car for approximately 18 hours before she was found dead on Christmas Eve Saturday. “She called 911 and was waiting for them,” her mother, Wanda Brown Steele, told the television station.
She thinks her daughter probably died from carbon monoxide poisoning. “The car was running and the snow kept falling, so it blocked the pipes, the exhaust pipe,” she said. “Then after the car shut off, that’s when it froze up.”
“Everyone who tried to get to her got stuck,” added another of her sisters, Tomeshia Brown. “Fire department, police, everyone got stuck,” she said, asking why the “snow state (NY)” had no emergency vehicles that could operate during the monster storm.
The young Buffalo native grew up in Charlotte and had returned to New York last year to help care for her ailing father. She would soon be 23 years old. Now her family is asking for help getting the body back to North Carolina.
Last night President Joe Biden declared a state of emergency in New York to provide federal aid to the region of the country most affected by the Christmas climate tragedy. At least 28 people died in the northwestern part of the state after Storm Elliot unleashed its full fury in Buffalo, bringing hurricane-force winds and snow that brought zero visibility conditions and paralyzed emergency response efforts.
Looting has also been reported. It appears that criminals are taking advantage of the fact that the authorities have focused on health and rescue priorities, and in addition to the fact that the mobility of the agents remains limited by the snow. Thousands of homes and businesses remain without power, in some areas there is up to 49 inches of accumulated snow and it continues to snow, The New York Times reported yesterday.
