A 22-year-old woman froze to death while trapped in her car by snow, she sent a video to her family hours before she died awaiting rescue.
Anndel Taylor who was found dead in her car after she became stranded over the weekend on her way home from work in Buffalo, New York state, became one of 35 to succumb to the extreme cold in the worst winter storm to hit the US in a generation.
She was reportedly trapped in her vehicle for 18 hours as more than 50 inches of snow surrounded her vehicle.
In her final messages to family over WhatsApp on Christmas Eve, Taylor said she was ‘scared’ and sent two videos capturing the extreme blizzard blowing around her:
She showed them the windshields of her car completely covered in snow as she rolled down her window.
It is not clear if Taylor died from hypothermia or from carbon monoxide poisoning after snow blocked the exhaust pipe as she attempted to keep herself warm.
In Buffalo, the dead were found in cars, homes and snowbanks. Some died while shovelling snow, while others perished when emergency crews could not respond to medical crises on time.
Mark Poloncarz, the executive of Erie County in New York, called the blizzard ‘the worst storm probably in our lifetime’, even for an area known for heavy snow.
Officials warned that the death toll could still increase as they forecasted a further foot of snow to fall.
The National Weather Service predicted that as much as two inches was forecast on Tuesday in Erie County, which includes Buffalo, the second-largest city in New York, with about 275,000 residents.
