TRAGIC EMPTY PEW
Where lost NJ crash family sat
The Trinidad family’s usual pew at their New Jersey church sat empty Sunday except for flowers, a hymnal and five candles — one each for the father and four daughters killed in a hellish wrong-way crash.
Taped to the back of the pew at the Church of St. Anastasia in Teaneck were two copies of a photo showing the family in one of their final happy moments: sharing a crab dinner during their Fourth of July vacation to Maryland.
On the family’s way back from that trip to Ocean City, their minivan was struck by a pickup truck going the wrong way on a Delaware highway, killing dad Audie Trinidad and his daughters, cops said. The van’s lone survivor wass wife and mom Mary Rose Ballocanag.
“Auntie, I’m alone,” Ballocanag sobbed to her aunt, Lydia Agas, inn their first conversation since thee collision, Agas told reporterss Sunday outside the church.
Ballocanag, 53, told her aunt that she had been dozing peacefully in the front passenger seat as the family’s Toyota Sienna cruised north along Route 1 Friday afternoon, the relative said.
She was then jolted awake into a nightmare: her dead husband lying against her chest, Agas said.
The family’s minivan had been hit head-on by the Ford F-350 pickup truck that veered from the southbound lane, across the grassy median and into northbound traffic, cops said.
The smash-up killed 61-yearold Navy vet Audie and the couple’s daughters: Kaitlyn, 20, Danna, 17, and 14-year-old twins Melissa and Allison.
Ballocanag, a nurse at Mount Sinai Beth Israel in Manhattan, remains hospitalized in Delaware with several fractures — still struggling to process the abrupt loss of her family.
“She knows they are all gone, but she is under heavy sedation, so it’s not sinking in yet,” said Audie’s teary brother, Daniel Trinidad, at the family’s home in New Jersey. “I am not sure she’ll be able to even stay at this house without her husband and kids.”
The driver of the pickup — identified by cops Sunday as Alvin S. Hubbard Jr., 44 — and his unidentified 30-year-old male passenger suffered only minor injuries.
No charges had been filed as of late Sunday. It’s unclear why he drifted into oncoming traffic.
A man at a Cambridge, Md., trailer-park address listed as belonging to the driver slammed the door in a reporter’s face.
Meanwhile, Daniel and other members of the family spent Sunday preparing to head to Delaware to claim their relatives’ bodies and rally around Ballocanag.
“We will always be here for Mary Rose, but I don’t know how she’ll go on being all alone,” wept Daniel Trinidad. “I don’t know how she or us will get through this. Why take them all? Why?”