The 19-year-old woman who was among two teenagers killed in a moped crash on Cross Island Parkway was living in a race against time and enjoying the moment, the victim’s grieving twin sister said Sunday.
The fatal accident victim, Giselle Flores, was supposed to go home early Saturday morning and meet up with her twin sister, Sharick Flores, later that same day for a weekend together. But she never came home.
Instead, her death was pronounced on the Queens Highway when the 15-year-old boy she was riding with lost control of the two-wheeler.
In the hour before the crash, Giselle, who was traveling with a friend of the twins, called her sister.
“I asked, ‘What are you still doing out there?’ She said, ‘Don’t worry, I’m going to have some friends pick me up. I’m going home and I’ll see you at 5 a.m.,'” Sharick told the Post. “And she never came home.”
“When motorcycles came to pick her up, she said to my best friend, ‘You know what, get on. Let’s go for a ride. We only live once.'”
Giselle, who lived in Queens, and the friend hopped on separate mopeds. Giselle was riding with teenager Andy Rodriguez, whom she had only met that evening, the sister said.
As Rodriguez was driving on the freeway around 2 a.m., he lost control and hit a car that sent the two into a freeway wall near 150th Street, Sharick said the friend told her about it.
The boy the friend was traveling with dropped her off at the side of the road to pick up Rodriguez and take him to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
Meanwhile, the friend called Sharick in a panic while Giselle lay lifeless.
“She’s not moving, she’s not breathing. She’s bleeding. I don’t know what to do. I said, ‘Brother, call 911,’ but they had already called 911,” Sharick recalled. “I finally went to the emergency room to see her and they told me my sister was dead.
“At the end, I saw my best friend covered in my sister’s blood – her legs, her shoes. She said, ‘I tried to wake her up, but she didn’t wake up.'”
Sharick said her mother is “so devastated” as the family raises money for funeral expenses.
Sharick called her sister “more than my best friend.” The couple dreamed of going to college together after Giselle graduated from high school in November.
“She was my whole world. My sister and I have been through a lot,” Sharick said. “We have the same mentality. We think alike. We actually wanted to go to college for the same reason, to study medicine. She wanted to be a nurse and I wanted to be an ultrasound technician.”
However, Sharick also noted that her sister “always knew this was going to happen because she had this attitude of, ‘We only live once.'”
Sharick, who lives in the upstate, was supposed to drive to Queens to pick up her sister and bring her back upstate so the siblings could spend a weekend together.
“She said, ‘You know what? We ride jet skis, we go shopping, we do this and that,'” Sharick said.
“I told her, ‘Relax, girl,’ and she said, ‘No, baby, we’re doing all this because what if I die tomorrow?’ Her attitude was always: What if we die? We have to live for today.”
The investigation into the fatal accident is ongoing, but no arrests have been made.
