A speeding driver who sparked a horrific Queens crash that killed a Colombian immigrant and her 10-year-old daughter was drunk behind the wheel — and has been charged with manslaughter, police said Sunday.
Tyrone Absolam, 42, was allegedly intoxicated when he crashed into Diana Granobles’ 2019 Chevrolet Cruze just outside Kennedy Airport about 8:45 p.m. Saturday, killing her and her daughter, cops said.
“They were like the American dream,” said Brittany Acensio, 24, a relative of Granobles’ husband. “We just want justice . . . We don’t want that to happen to anyone else.”
Granobles, 31, was with daughter Isabella on her way to pick up her husband from work when her car was struck, sources said.
She was making a left turn onto Guy R. Brewer Blvd. from Rockaway Blvd. in Springfield Gardens when Absolam, speeding west in a 2018 Nissan Altima with three passengers inside, slammed into her car, cops said.
First responders found Granobles and her young daughter unconscious inside their wrecked car. Medics rushed them to Jamaica Hospital but they couldn’t be saved, police said. They lived in Copiague, L.I., according to authorities.
“I drank from my girlfriend’s cup of vodka and iced tea at around 5 p.m. while we were at the beach,” Absolam told detectives responding to the scene, according to court documents. “It’s a new car, there are no issues with it. I was driving 50 miles per hour.”
The speed limit on Rockaway Blvd. is 35 mph.
Granobles immigrated to New York from Colombia with her husband when she was 18 in search of a better life, sources said.
The couple has two other children, a 6-year-old girl and a 3-year-old boy, who were born in New York but are currently in Colombia, the sources added.
Lorenzano and Diana married in 2008, family members said. The husband declined to comment on the tragedy.
Absolam and a 38-year-old woman riding in his front passenger seat were taken to Jamaica Hospital, where they remained in critical condition Sunday, police said.
Absolam appeared to be drunk and responding officers said he had blood shot, watery eyes. Two field sobriety tests were performed; he failed them both, according to court documents.
Investigators are awaiting blood work to determine his blood alcohol content, police said.
Medics took a 12-year-old boy and 16-year-old girl riding in the back of Absolam’s Nissan to Cohen Children’s Medical Center in serious but stable condition.
“As alleged, the defendant’s selfish, illegal choices resulted in the tragic death of a 10-year-old girl and her mother and caused injuries to himself and his passengers,” said Queens District Attorney, Melinda Katz. “The rules of the road are not suggestions. They exist to keep motor vehicles from becoming deadly objects of destruction. When they are ignored, the results can be catastrophic.”
Absolam, who was just over a mile from home when he crashed, was charged Sunday with manslaughter, vehicular manslaughter, criminally negligent homicide, assault and driving while intoxicated.
“I can’t tell you what that grown a– man was doing,” a relative of Absolam’s who lives in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, told The News. “Just leave us alone and go bother him about it.”
If convicted, Absolam faced up to 25 years in prison.
The crash came amid a spike in traffic deaths in New York City that began last summer.
At least 124 people were killed in New York City crashes during the first six months of 2021. The city is on pace to see the highest number of traffic deaths in a calendar year since Mayor de Blasio took office in 2014, according to an analysis published last week by the street safety advocacy group Transportation Alternatives.
The advocates believe de Blasio’s Vision Zero program, which launched when the mayor took office with the goal of eventually eliminating preventable traffic deaths in the city, has fallen short.
“More people are dying on Mayor de Blasio’s streets because he failed to quickly and aggressively scale the safety solutions of Vision Zero that he knows work, instead choosing to deliver piecemeal projects and unfulfilled promises,” said Transportation Alternatives executive director Danny Harris.