The 19-year-old woman, one of two teenagers killed when their moped tragically crashed on the Cross Island Expressway, lived in the moment in a race against time, the victim’s grieving twin sister said Sunday.
Giselle Flores, the fatal victim, was supposed to return home early Saturday morning and meet her twin sister Sharick Flores later in the day for a weekend together. But she never returned home.
Instead, she was pronounced dead on the Queens Expressway when the 15-year-old boy she was traveling with lost control of the two-wheeler.
In the hour before the accident, Giselle, who had been out with a friend of the twins, called her sister.
“I asked her, ‘What are you still doing out?’ She said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll have some friends come get me. I’ll go home and see you at 5 a.m.,’” Sharick told the Post. “And she never came home.”
“When the motorcycles came to pick her up, she said to my best friend, ‘You know what, get on. Let’s go for a ride. You only live once.’”
Giselle, who lives in Queens, and her friend each rode their mopeds. Giselle left with teenager Andy Martinez, whom she had just met that night, the sister said.
As Martinez was driving on the freeway around 2 a.m., he lost control and hit a car that sent the couple into a freeway wall near 150th Street, Sharick said, according to his friend.
The boy the friend was traveling with dropped her off at the side of the road to pick up Andy and rush 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 ended up going to the emergency room to check on her, and they told me my sister was dead.”
“I ended up seeing 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 their mother was “so devastated” as the family raised money for funeral expenses.
Sharick called her sister “more than my best friend.” The couple dreamed of going to college together after Giselle graduated high school in November.
“She was my whole life. My sister and I have been through a lot,” Sharick said. “We have the same mentality. We think the same way. We actually wanted to go to college for the same thing, to study medicine. She was going to be a nurse and I was going to be an ultrasound technician.”
But Sharick also noted that his sister “always knew it was going to happen because she had this mentality that you only live once.”
Sharick, who lives upstate, was supposed to travel to Queens to pick up his sister and bring her back upstate so the siblings could spend a weekend together.
“She said, ‘You know what? We’re going to jet ski, we’re going to go shopping, we’re going to do this and that,'” Sharick said.
“I said, ‘Relax, girl,’ and she said, ‘No, honey, we’re going to do all this because what if I die tomorrow?’ Her mentality was always the same: ‘What if we die? We have to live day by day.’”
The investigation into the fatal accident is ongoing and no arrests have been made.
