A teenager enrolled in a residential program for people with emotional problems was charged Wednesday with dropping a 16-pound bowling ball off an overpass in Jersey City that crashed through the windshield of a car below, killing a baby girl in the back seat.
The suspect, Calvin J. Settle, 18, was arrested early Wednesday morning on a homicide charge. He was accused of pushing the black Brunswick ball over a concrete barrier near the Holland Tunnel on Sunday night. The attack turned a routine ride home for a Brooklyn family into a violent ordeal of shattered glass and sudden death.Prosecutors would not discuss a motive, but the police report on Settle's arrest indicated that the incident might have stemmed from a spur-of-the-moment prank.
Settle told the arresting officers who picked him up at his apartment in Jersey City that the episode began when his friends found the bowling ball in the trash and ended minutes later when he took it to the highway barrier, the report and prosecutors said.
The ball fell 15 to 20 feet. It traveled so fast that it richocheted off the bumper of an 18-wheel truck driving west on Route 139, known as the Depressed Highway, then went into the eastbound lane and smashed through the windshield of a 1991 Audi station wagon, hitting the baby, Natalia Rivera, in the head. The ball then burst through the back window, prosecutors said.
Santos and Donna Rivera, the baby's parents, were sitting in the front seat and were not injured. Another child, Santos Jr., 3, who was in the back seat, was not hurt. The baby suffered severe head injuries and died a few hours later at University Hospital in Newark.
Reacting to Settle's arrest Wednesday, the Riveras said that they found no solace in directing their anger toward the teenage suspect.
"People say, `Do you want to rip his face off?' But what good would that do?" Rivera said. "Did my daughter die for that? I don't think so."