- On July 26, 2009, Diane Schuler drove the wrong way on the Taconic State Parkway and killed eight, including her daughter.
- Tests showed she was drunk and stoned — but her family insisted there was more to the story
- “I just felt that it was a tragedy,” an investigator on the case tells PEOPLE
It’s been almost 16 years since that terrible summer afternoon in July 2009 when Diane Schuler, a 36-year-old doting mother of two young children, took a wrong turn on the Taconic State Parkway in Westchester County, N.Y., and killed eight people, including herself, her daughter and three nieces.
What happened that day shattered many families and still haunts those who were caught up in the tragedy.
“I just drove down the parkway today,” says Thomas Ruskin, a former New York City police detective who spent several months working as a private investigator for Daniel Schuler, Diane’s husband, digging into what really caused his wife’s erratic and ultimately deadly driving.
“There’s often flowers there at the crash site,” Ruskin tells PEOPLE, “but today I noticed someone put a cross up in the snow where all the cars ended up.”
Even after more than a decade, the question of why Diane — an apparently hardworking, responsible supervisor for Cablevision, described by friends as “the perfect mom” — could have acted like that behind the wheel has become a heart-wrenching enigma that Ruskin and others are still trying to understand.
Robert Sabo/NY Daily News Archive via Getty
“How she ended up traveling southbound on the northbound lane of the Taconic is one of those unanswered questions that I’ll take to my grave,” says Ruskin, president of CMP Protective and Investigative Group. “There’s no explaining it.”
On the surface, the facts behind the worst car crash in Westchester County in 90 years are fairly straightforward.
Diane and then-37-year-old Daniel had spent the weekend swimming and playing with their two kids and three nieces at the Hunter Lake Campground in New York’s Catskill Mountains. The family packed up and began their drive back to their home in West Babylon, N.Y., at 9:30 a.m. local time on July 26, 2009.
Diane was driving a minivan with the five kids and Daniel was in his truck, along with luggage and the family dog.
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Seth Wenig/AP
“The kids were yelling out the window, saying they had fun and couldn’t wait to come back,” campground owner Ann Scott told PEOPLE days later.
During Diane’s drive home, she stopped at a McDonald’s where witnesses told investigators that they saw no signs she was in physical distress. She later stopped at a Sunoco gas station where she reportedly asked a clerk for an over-the-counter pain relief medication that the store did not sell.
At 11:37 a.m. Diane’s 8-year-old niece, Emma Hance, called her father, Warren, Diane’s older brother, to let him know they were running late.
Before hanging up, Warren spoke briefly with Diane, later recalling that she sounded normal.
A half hour later, eyewitnesses began calling 911 to report seeing the red minivan driving erratically and aggressively, darting in and out of traffic, and tailgating other cars.
Emma called her dad back at 12:58 p.m. to relay an ominous message that they were lost and Diane was having difficulty seeing.
“There’s something wrong with Aunt Diane,” the girl said.
Warren called his sister and was disturbed by their short conversation. He later described Diane as sounding “disoriented,” while she continually slurred her words and called him “Danny.”
Warren pleaded with Diane to wait where she was on the side of the highway and he would come get them. He attempted to call her back multiple times, but the calls went unanswered.
Courtesy Hance Family
Police believe that it was sometime around 1:30 p.m. when Diane got back on the road and drove up the exit ramp of the Taconic Parkway and then, according to several witnesses, began speeding at over 80 mph into oncoming traffic — reportedly causing more than a dozen drivers to swerve out of her way.
One of those drivers was Corey Lowe, who previously recounted to PEOPLE what it was like watching the vehicle barrel straight toward them.
“For a minute we were like, ‘Is that a car?’ ” Lowe — who noted that the minivan “wasn’t swerving; she stayed in a straight line” — said in 2009.
“It came speeding past us at like 80 mph,” he said. “It was the eeriest thing I ever saw.”
For nearly two miles other drivers were somehow able to veer out of Diane’s path. Her luck finally ran out near Briarcliff Manor, N.Y., as she rounded a blind curve and collided head-on with an oncoming SUV.
In the blink of an eye, eight people were dead: Diane, her 2-year-old daughter, Erin, and her nieces Emma, Alyson, 7, and 5-year-old Kate, along with the passengers in the SUV, Michael Bastardi, 81, his son Guy, 49, and their longtime friend Daniel Longo, 74.
The only survivor was Diane’s 5-year-old son, Bryan, who sustained a serious head injury that resulted in nerve damage to his right eye.
Those who witnessed the collision and sprang into action afterwards described the scene to PEOPLE in 2009 as nothing short of horrific.
“People were running to the car screaming, ‘We need help, there are kids in there!’ ” said Peter Dedvukaj, who pulled four children — two of the little girls were dead — out of the twisted, burning minivan.
“There was nothing we could do. The third girl had a pulse, but she died later. I was crying the whole time,” Dedvukaj said. “The kids weren’t moving. They weren’t breathing. They looked like angels.”
James Keivom/NY Daily News Archive via Getty
The tragedy took an even more bewildering twist nine days later when Westchester County officials released the results of toxicology tests that revealed Diane had alcohol in her bloodstream that was twice the legal limit in New York.
Police, who discovered a broken bottle of Absolut vodka in the wreckage, described her blood alcohol level as the equivalent of consuming 10 shots of alcohol in an hour. They also found evidence that Diane had smoked marijuana shortly before the crash.
The new details proved unfathomable for some of those who felt they knew Diane best — and infuriated those who didn’t.
“This is so out of the realm of possibility, it just blows my mind,” said her best friend, Christine Lipani, one of several loved ones who told PEOPLE at the time that the Diane they remembered was a devoted parent and virtual teetotaler.
Her husband of seven years echoed that sentiment. “She was not an alcoholic,” Daniel said two days after the autopsy findings were released, insisting that his wife may have been suffering from some sort of medical crisis — such as a painful tooth abscess — that led to the reckless driving.
“I never saw her drunk since the day I met her,” he said.
But others clearly had. By that November The New York Times reported Diane’s sister-in-law Joan Schuler had told investigators after the crash that Diane “smoked marijuana virtually every single day of her life” and described her as a “hard drinker.”
Courtesy Bastardi Family
The refusal by Daniel and other relatives to accept the findings of his wife’s toxicology report — despite tests ruling out a stroke or aneurysm as a possible cause of the crash — was the focus of the disturbing 2011 HBO documentary There’s Something Wrong With Aunt Diane.
Investigator Ruskin had Diane’s blood samples retested for Daniel and his attorney. The findings of those tests mirrored the results detailed in the official autopsy report released by Westchester County officials.
“She was definitely drunk and high at the time of the accident,” he says now.
Ruskin says he had a falling out with Daniel and his lawyers after learning Daniel planned to move forward with lawsuits, including alleging that the New York highway where his wife crashed was poorly designed. (There have reportedly been settlements in at least four of the suits stemming from the wreck; the Schuler family has avoided the spotlight in recent years.)
“I just felt that it was a tragedy,” Ruskin says, “and they should let Diane and everyone else rest in peace and not stir it up further with litigation.”
Courtesy Schuler Family
For the families and friends of those killed by Diane in 2009, there is probably no explanation that will ever bring closure.
“People always ask how I feel about Diane,” her sister-in-law Jackie Hance told Ladies’ Home Journal in 2011. “You can’t imagine how complex that question is. How does a person go from being like a sister to me — adored by my girls and cherished by my husband — to being the one who ruined our lives?”
All these years later, Ruskin continually asks himself the same question that so many others have asked.
“To this day, I have often wondered — was she trying to commit suicide or was she so intoxicated that she didn’t even know what she was doing?” he says. “Would she really want to hurt herself with all those little, innocent children in the car? That’s something I don’t think we’ll ever know.”
