Dad’s deadly warn
Unlicensed crash kid told not to drive
The dad of the teen driver in a fatal Scarsdale crash said Monday that he begged his son to stay off the road just before the tragic crash that killed him along with four young relatives.
“I told him, his mother told him, his older brothers told him, stop driving without a license, without a permit,” the teen’s father, also named Malik Smith, told CBS News.
“‘Anything happens, you get pulled over, you get in trouble for these things. Stop doing this.’ ”
The junior Smith and four other young relatives were killed when the 16-year-old Malik crashed off a Scarsdale parkway in the early hours of Sunday.
Pictures of those that perished — between ages 8 and 17 — emerged in a series of social media posts by their parents as well as a fundraiser seeking help for their collective funerals.
Anthony Billips, father of two of the children killed in the crash, called it “the most painful post I ever had to write in my life” as he revealed he, his wife, ex-wife and sister had “lost our precious kids in a fatal car accident.”
“Six kids [were] in the car only one survived,” he wrote of the 9-year-old boy who police said was in the rear cargo area of the Nissan Rogue that flew off the Hutchinson River Parkway and into a tree around 12:30 a.m.
“The pain we are feeling words [can’t] even express and we wouldn’t wish this to happen to anyone in this world,” Billips wrote.
Along with 16-year-old driver Malik Smith, killed in the crash were 17-year-old Anthony Billips Jr., 12-year-old Zahnyiah Cross, 11-year-old Shawnell Cross and 8-year-old Andrew Billips, Westchester County Police said.
According to sources and news reports, the passengers in the Nissan Rogue were Malik’s cousins.
“He goes to the mall,” grieving dad Billips said. “He goes to get his ice cream with his cousin. They go to the movies. They walk about the mall. They do what teenagers and kids do. So that’s, it’s just, I didn’t know he was driving by himself.”
Zahnyiah’s mom, Nicole Cross, shared a series of harrowing posts with pics of some of the dead children, writing: “Mommy loves you girls sooooo F—ING much.”
“Lord Jesus I don’t understand why you had to take our babies from us please give us the strength,” she wrote in an earlier post Sunday.
She linked to a fundraiser that by Monday morning had raised nearly $20,000 of its $50,000 target “to help bury our children we lost.”
“Please anything will help we just want to put our babies to rest,” she wrote in that.
Police said all five kids were from Connecticut, and school officials said they were such new arrivals in Derby that they had yet to be enrolled in the school district there.
“It’s the unimaginable,” Derby’s superintendent of schools, Matt Conway, said of the tragedy.
“Having to now make arrangements for five of your children to be buried is a very difficult thing for anyone — one child, never mind five,” Conway said.