A woman from Charlotte, North Carolina, died over the weekend in the Buffalo blizzard after being stuck in her vehicle for over 18 hours.
Anndel Taylor, 22, was driving home from work in Buffalo on Friday and got stranded in the snow, WSOC-TV reported. (RELATED: ‘The Pain Is Overwhelming’: Buffalo Man Found Dead On Street In Storm)
“I don’t know if any of us really knew how serious it was, we didn’t see the news, we didn’t really know what was going on in Buffalo,” Shawnequa Brown, Taylor’s sister, told WSOC-TV.
“She was telling my sister that she was scared,” Brown added.
While in her car, Taylor had shared video of the snow with her family and called 911, WSOC-TV reported. The first responders could not contact her, so Taylor decided to sleep out the storm and walk home, according to Wanda Brown Steele, Taylor’s mother.
Steele thinks her daughter died from carbon monoxide poisoning before freezing because the snow could have blocked the exhaust pipe, WSOC-TV reported. Others think that she died of hyperthermia.
Tommie Brown, Anndel Taylor’s other sister, questioned why a “state that is known for snow” did not have adequate resources to help her sister.
“I feel like everybody that tried to get to her got stuck,” Tommie Brown told WSOC-TV. “Fire department, police, everybody got stuck. Why didn’t they have chains on their tires? This is a state that is known for snow.”
Shawnequa Brown set up a GoFundMe page to organize funeral services for her sister. She has raised over $12,000 as of Tuesday morning.