Cypriot woman killed in NY crash

A 30-YEAR OLD Cypriot woman was killed by a drunk driver in New York on Sunday when the cab in which she was a passenger was broadsided violently by a Range Rover.

The female cab driver Bessy Velasquez, 41, was also killed.

Panayiotia Demetriou, who left Cyprus seven years ago to study in the US, was coming home from a night out with friends in the early hours of Sunday, according to a report in the New York Times.

The cab had just dropped off Demetriou’s friends and was heading southbound towards her home when the Range Rover travelling westwards hit the vehicle at high speed, throwing it half a block.

Demetriou, who was known to her friends in the US as ‘Penny’ worked as a psychologist in the emergency room of a hospital in Brooklyn. She was completing her thesis in child psychology.

The driver of the Range Rover was dazed but not hurt in the collision. He was named as Daryush Omar, 23, and has previously been suspected of beating a man to death in Manhattan in 2006.

An eyewitness who called emergency services said it was clear the two people in the cab were severely injured. Omar now faces charges of vehicular manslaughter and drink driving.

“Both women were pronounced dead a short while later at Mount Sinai Hospital of Queens.,” the New York Times said.

In another development at the crash scene, a man was arrested and charged with having taken money from one of the victims, who was lying in the street. He was named as Evangelos Fotiou, 42, a resident of the area.

Fotiou, was charged with “obstructing governmental administration and petty larceny”.

A friend of Demetriou’s, Effie Delimarkos Fletcher told the newspaper: “She could find goodness in every situation. She was the kind of friend that if you were a friend for a few months you were a friend for life.”

Fletcher said Demetriou had only gone out that night to attend a friend’s party. She had not been out for weeks, she said, because she was working on her thesis.