CARNEYS POINT, N.J. – A 41-year-old man from Colorado has been charged in connection with the horrific wrong-way crash on the New Jersey Turnpike that took the lives of four young bochurim early Sunday morning.
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Authorities said the driver, Christopher Neff of Westminster, Colorado, was traveling north in the southbound lanes near Exit 1 in Carneys Point when his pickup truck slammed head-on into an SUV carrying the boys. The impact was so severe that their vehicle was pushed into a tractor-trailer, r”l, killing all four instantly.
The victims were identified as Yaakov Kilberg, 19, who was driving, and his friends Aharon Lebovits, 18, and Shlomo Cohen, 18, all from Lakewood, and Chaim Grossman, 18, of Fallsburg, New York.
Police said Neff was heavily intoxicated at the time of the crash, with a blood alcohol level reportedly more than twice the legal limit. He also faces weapons charges after officers found hollow-point ammunition in his vehicle.
Investigators later learned Neff had been drinking at a nearby bar less than an hour before the tragedy. He remains hospitalized with multiple injuries.
The levayos and outpouring of grief from the community reflected the immeasurable loss. Friends and family described the boys as ehrliche, kind-hearted, and devoted to helping others. All four were close friends who spent much of their time volunteering for Bikur Cholim of Lakewood, offering rides, delivering food, and assisting families in need.
Baruch Dayen HaEmes
These boys did so much chesed and good, please take down the picture, it’s too painful
Let me get this right. We are paying millions in hospital charges only to keep him alive and then hopefully get the death penalty. The system is broken.
I worked in the zone Leno was very well loved and popular we will definitely be missing him all of them bde.
So what to does bochorim learning how to drive better help with all due respect to rabbi bender
If you have Facebook, look up this crazy murderer Neff from Colorado. All tattooed up. It even shows his white pickup truck. What an evil piece of garbage. I wonder what he was doing in Jersey.
I do have to say that one family choosing to have a campaign to write a Sefer Torah Just for their son and not one written for all of them, seems kind of cold and exclusionary. If they were such good friends and they all died together so tragically, then why leave the other three out? Not nice and quite insulting. Talk about pouring salt on a wound. That’s NOT what we’re about.