NY Times: "For Four Canadians in Bronx Crash, a Fiery End to a Holiday
By DENNIS HEVESI
Published: May 22, 1991
It was a gathering of the clan -- relatives and friends from the Treadways district in St. Catherine's Parish on the island of Jamaica exchanging childhood memories and banter Sunday night at an impromptu get-together in New Jersey.
Horace Taffe and his wife, Carmen; their cousin, Faye Duncan Reid, and her school chum, Judith Ann McKenzie, had driven from Ontario, Canada, on Friday for a three-day weekend in New York City -- and then to the celebration on Sunday at Errol Reid's house in Irvington.
But a few minutes after midnight, on their way from the party to another cousin's home in the Bronx, the joy ended.
At Bruckner Boulevard and East Tremont Avenue in the Throgs Neck section of the Bronx -- where a traffic light may not have been working properly -- the Taffes' 1991 Chrysler and a tank truck carrying 4,000 gallons of gasoline slammed into each other. A 60-foot-high fireball instantly took the four Canadians' lives, as well as the truck driver's. Streams of flaming fuel then incinerated a row of stores. One in the Group Spared
Another friend, Lloyd Cohen of Toronto, had traveled from Canada with the Taffes on Friday. He, too, was at the party in New Jersey and was supposed to make the return trip to the Bronx. Fate intervened and spared him.
The talk at the party had been of ball playing and of cooking, Mr. Taffe's second cousin, Leo McCatty of Irvington, recalled yesterday, as well as of the much-anticipated wedding next month of Mr. McCatty's sister, Pat.
"There was so much laughter," Mr. McCatty said. "Just a joyous evening." Mr. McCatty went to bed that night with nothing but pleasant memories of the party. But as he commuted from Irvington to his job as a mechanic in the Bronx on Monday morning, he heard the news on the radio about a horrible accident and of the Canadian license plates on the car involved.
In the pit of his stomach, Mr. McCatty said, he knew. "I felt like something was wrong, like something had changed," he said last night, his voice cracking. He detoured to the scene, where he told police of his worst suspicions. He was terribly right.
Yesterday, at the fatal intersection, three scorched parking meters, their insides reduced to grotesque molten blobs, stood forlorn sentinel outside boarded storefronts, reminders of what had been a busy commercial block only 36 hours earlier. Down the street, toward the intersection of Tremont Avenue, a 10-foot-deep trench was all that remained where eight stores had stood. Bulldozers and dump trucks had hauled off the debris.
There were at least three witnesses to the collision, said a person close to the police investigation who spoke on condition of anonymity. One witness, the person said, told detectives that the traffic light was stuck: red for the truck and green for the car.
Two other witnesses said they had heard the truck's brakes screeching just as it ap proached the intersection. A spokesman for the New York State Department of Transportation, Thomas D. Apple, said the driver of the truck, Alfredo Gonzalez, 33 years old, of Jackson Heights, Queens, had received three summonses in 1988, all for ignoring traffic signals.
Mr. Apple said Mr. Gonzalez received all three tickets in Manhattan while driving a van for W & W Cabinet Distribution Inc. of Maspeth, Queens. But Mr. Apple said there was no indication that Mr. Gonzalez's license had been suspended or revoked.
Two of the violations occurred on June 3, 1988, and may have arisen out of the same incident, Mr. Apple said. One citation was for disobeying either a yield sign or a stop sign, and the other was for running a red light.
Rather than going to court to contest the violations, Mr. Gonzalez pleaded guilty and paid fines for both offenses -- $35 for one and $50 for the other, Mr. Apple said. On Dec. 14, 1988, he said, Mr. Gonzalez pleaded guilty to disobeying traffic light and paid a $35 fine.
Meanwhile the Police Department and the City Transportation Department disagreed on whether the traffic light was malfunctioning.
The Police Department's deputy commissioner for public information, Suzanne Trazoff, said a police officer from the 45th Precinct noticed that the traffic light was stuck on red in one direction and green in the other and reported the problem to the police dispatcher at 11:16 P.M. Sunday.
The dispatcher, Ms. Trazoff said, informed the Transportation Department at 11:20 P.M. The accident occurred 51 minutes later, at 12:11 A.M.
A spokesman for the Transportation Department, Joseph DePlasco, said, however, that there was no record of the police or anyone else informing his department of a problem at the intersection before the accident. Mr. DePlasco said that computerized monitoring of the light indicated that there was no malfunction. A Holiday in Canada
He also said that when a traffic signal is not working, city regulations require that it be fixed within two hours -- leaving open the question of whether a police officer or someone from the Transportation Department should have been posted at the intersection until the light was fixed.
Considerations like this were hardly on the minds of the relatives and friends of Horace Taffe, 37, a construction worker; his wife, Carmen, 30, a computer operator; their cousin, Faye Duncan Reid, 22, and her friend, Judith Ann McKenzie, 22, all from the Toronto suburb of Mississauga.
Monday was Victoria Day in Canada, a holiday in honor of Queen Victoria and the first holiday of the vacation season, and it was cause for a three-day weekend. It was an opportunity for the Taffes to make one of their four or five trips a year to New York.
Mr. Taffe's cousin, Shirley Taffe, owner of the Bricktop Restaurant on White Plains Road near 227th Street in the Bronx, described Mr. Taffe as an outgoing person who loved New York City. "As soon as you see him, you begin to smile," she said.
Reached by phone last night at his home in Malton, Ontario, Stephen McKenzie, 49, a contractor, said he had at first held out hope that his daughter might have survived the collision, because early reports had said three people died and one was seriously injured. But then, about 11 A.M. yesterday, another television report made clear that everyone had been killed -- a fact confirmed by film footage of the car. 'I'm So Numb'
Then came the police request for his daughter's dental records. "I don't know what to say; I'm so numb," Mr. McKenzie said.
The only saving grace to the tragedy was the survival of Mr. Cohen, 29, the other friend from Jamaica who had traveled from Canada with the Taffes for the weekend. Instead of riding to the Bronx in the Taffes' car, Mr. Cohen chose at the last minute -- at the request of his sister, Audrey Brown -- to ride with another friend. This allowed him to pick up a bat and ball that the friend had bought as a birthday present for Ms. Brown's 9-year-old son.
"The person who bought that ball and bat saved my brother's life," Ms. Brown said yesterday. Except for the turn of fate, she added, "he wouldn't be here tonight."
Photos: A frontloader lifting charred debris yesterday from a row of stores that were incinerated early on Monday when a gasoline truck collided with a car at East Tremont Avenue and Bruckner Boulevard in the Throgs Neck section of the Bronx. The heat from the fire melted parking meters. "