A 19-year-old woman, one of two young people killed in a tragic moped crash on the Cross Island Expressway, was living in the moment in a race against time, the victim's grieving twin sister said Sunday.
The victim, Giselle Flores, had planned to drive home early Saturday morning and meet up with her twin, Sharic Flores, that same day for a weekend getaway, but she never made it home.
Instead, she was pronounced dead on the Queens Highway after the 15-year-old boy she was riding with lost control of his motorcycle.
An hour before the accident, Gisele, who was out with a friend of her twins, called her sister.
“I said, ‘What are you still doing?’ And she said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll get a friend to pick you up. I’ll come home and see you at 5 in the morning,’” Sharik told the Post. “And she never came home again.
“When the motorbike came to pick her up, she said to my best friend, 'Hey, get in. Let's go for a drive. You only live once.'”
Gisele, who lives in Queens, and her friend hopped on separate mopeds, and Gisele went with Andy Martinez, a teenager she'd just met that night, her sisters said.
Sharic said he heard from a friend that Martinez was driving on the freeway around 2 a.m. when he lost control and struck a vehicle, sending them both bouncing off a freeway wall near 150th Street.
A boy who was riding with her friend dropped her off on the side of the road, picked up Andy and rushed him to hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
Meanwhile, as Gisele lay unconscious, her friend frantically called Sharik.
“She wasn't moving, she wasn't breathing and she was bleeding. I didn't know what to do. I said, 'Brother, call 911,' but they had already called,” Sharik recalled. “I ended up going to the emergency room to see her and they told me she was already dead.
“I ended up meeting my sister's best friend covered in blood – her feet and shoes. She said, 'I tried to wake her up but she wouldn't wake up.'”
Sharik said his mother was “very sad” and the family We are raising funds for funeral expenses.
Sharik called Gisele's sister “more than a best friend,” and the two had hoped to go to college together after Gisele graduated from high school in November.
“She was my everything. My sister and I have been through a lot,” Sharik said. “We have the same mindset. We think alike. We actually both had the same goal of going to college and studying medicine. She was going to be a nurse and I was going to be a sonographer.”
But Sharik added that her sister “always knew something like this would happen because she had this one-time-life mentality.”
Sharik, who lives in upstate New York, had planned to drive to Queens to pick up her sister and bring her back upstate so the siblings could spend the weekend together.
“She said, 'Hey, let's go on jet skis, go shopping and do this and that,'” Sharic said.
“I told her, 'Calm down,' but she said, 'No, baby, we're going to do all this because what if I die tomorrow?' Her mindset has always been, 'What if we die? We've got to live today.'
The investigation into the fatal crash remains ongoing and no arrests have been made.
