Mystery: Christina Battimelli, 21, wasn’t texting or talking on the phone and she …

By
Daily Mail Reporter

PUBLISHED:

14:38 EST, 29 July 2012

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UPDATED:

14:39 EST, 29 July 2012

Christina Battimelli

Mystery: Christina Battimelli, 21, wasn’t texting or talking on the phone and she hadn’t been drinking

A 21-year-old nurse-in-training was killed driving back to her grandmother, who she took care of, when she crashed her car into a utility pole less than a mile from home.

New York City police are at a loss to explain why Christina Battimelli careered off the road in Staten Island, New York, early Saturday.

They said alcohol was not a factor and witnesses reported that she wasn’t texting, either — her cell phone was still in her purse when she died.

Miss Battimelli was driving home from
seeing a friend about 2.30am when her Hyundai Elantra crashed on a
secluded neighborhood road, police say.

‘She
was a nursing student, an aspiring young girl who lived in Staten
Island her whole life,’ her uncle George Picon told the New York Post.

He said Miss Battimelli cared for her 83-year-old grandmother and was driving to her house when she crashed.

Police say her car smashed in to the back of a parked van and then careered into a telephone pole.

Paramedics rushed her to the hospital, where she died on arrival.

Horrified neighbors hear Miss Battimelli screaming for help within seconds of the crash, the Staten Island Advance reports.

Police have ruled out alcohol as a factor in the crash.

Witnesses
told the Advance that they saw police pull a cell phone out of the
purse in her car — which means she wasn’t texting or talking on the
phone, either.

On Sunday, her family tied a pink ribbon around the pole where she crash that said ‘RIP Christina.’

Friends
and classmates at St Paul’s School of Nursing took to Facebook to mourn
her death as inconsolable family members tried to understand what could
have made her crash.