Three killed in street-racing wreck

MALLORY Fuhrmeister had gotten home just before midnight Wednesday when she heard a thunderous crash. She had heard such crashes before, living just behind a Bustleton business park where trucks trundle too fast on both the curve and the straightaways of Sandmeyer Lane - and where daredevils like to test their driving skills after dusk, when the trucks are long gone.

But this time was different. This time, the crash was followed by cries for help.

"I'm a bleeding heart - if someone needs help, I have to help," said Fuhrmeister, who rushed over to Sandmeyer Lane, where she saw something so horrifying that her voice still shook when she tried to describe it the next day.

A car had crashed into a tree, its smoking wreckage so demolished that it appeared to be two vehicles instead of one. Limp, unmoving bodies lay on the ground, and a man covered in blood stood by the driver's side door.

"He just kept saying: 'I need to call my mom, I need to call my mom,' " said Fuhrmeister, who gently took the young man's phone from him to dial 9-1-1.

After she returned his phone and tried to calm him, she surveyed the scene to see if she could help anyone else.

But three of the 2007 Acura's passengers - Sabrina Rhoads and Yvette Gonzalez, both 17 from Northeast Philly, and Felipe Hernandez, 20, of Medford, N.J. - were beyond help. Medics who arrived minutes later declared them dead at the scene. Rhoads and Gonzalez had been ejected on impact, while Hernandez was heavily trapped and had to be cut from the wreckage by emergency workers.

A fourth passenger, Bogdan Arutyanov, 17, of Northeast Philly, was thrown from the car, too. He remained in critical condition yesterday with severe head, femur and pelvic injuries at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, police said.

The bloodied driver, meanwhile, had disappeared.

"I don't even know where he went," Fuhrmeister said. "He was there, and then I turned around, and he wasn't."

Hours later, as investigators tried to piece together what led to a crash that left even veteran cops shaken, many questions remained. The driver's whereabouts, though, wasn't one of them.

Driver Christopher Bloomfield, 19, had shown up at Einstein Medical Center in bloody clothes sometime after the crash and remained there in stable condition yesterday.

Capt. John Wilczynski, commander of the Accident Investigation Division, said Bloomfield is cooperating with investigators.

Wilczynski confirmed that speed played a role in the wreck, estimating that the Acura was flying at more than 75 mph when it hit a curb in front of Seravalli Inc. contractors, flew through the air across the firm's driveway and smashed into a tree.

Investigators reviewed surveillance video from area businesses and deduced that a second car was speeding near the Acura.

Fuhrmeister, too, said she saw a second car stopped nearby seconds after the crash, its occupants sitting along the curb. But they, like Bloomfield, disappeared before emergency workers arrived, Fuhrmeister said.

"People in the other car, we want to talk to them," Wilczynski said, urging them or any other tipsters to call investigators at 215-685-3180. "The responsible thing to do would be to come forward and tell us what they saw."

Yet Wilczynski stopped short yesterday of blaming the crash on street racing.

"I'm told that's an area where people do drag-race, but I don't know if that's the case here. It's certainly possible," he said.

Still, neighbors of the business park had no doubt, saying Sandmeyer is an after-hours illegal speedway. Shredded tire fragments litter the skid-marked cul-de-sac from street-racers doing doughnuts there.

"Drag-racing all the time. Hear it every night, spinning wheels and loud cars racing," said John Quinn, 65, who has lived behind the business park since 1982.

On Sandmeyer Lane late yesterday afternoon, friends and family didn't want to talk about drag-racing.

Instead, they gathered under darkening skies around the tree where their loved ones died. Some carved mournful messages and draped mementos, including religious medallions, in the damaged bark.

"It's crazy," said Tyler Rhoads, 16, Sabrina's brother.

Sabrina and Yvette were best friends who met at George Washington High School, where both were students, the Rhoads family said. The girls bonded over their love of cosmetology, and both were beauties who always took care to look good.

Sabrina would have been a senior this fall and planned to join the Coast Guard after graduating, they said. She was excited about traveling with her boyfriend and his family to Florida over Christmas break, said her sister Angel Rhoads, 13.

She was one of eight children, and some of her siblings knew she hung out with friends who liked fast cars.

"I always told her, you can't be hanging with kids like that - you're going to get in a crash and get hurt," Tyler Rhoads said.

When he learned she had died, he said, "I cried so much, I got a headache."

Their grief was deeply felt by strangers, many of whom stopped early yesterday morning to take snapshots of the wreckage and marvel that anyone survived.

"I'm 58 years old and I never seen a car like that," said Mike Barbera, of Morrell Park, who dropped his son off at work yesterday morning and then joined onlookers to photograph a car so mangled police used a forklift to hoist it on a tow truck for removal. "That's such a shame, the families have to go through this, for a little bit of speed."

Blog: phillyconfidential.com