Family, neighbors mourn Yonkers crash victims

Sylvia Silverberg opened her apartment door Monday morning in Yonkers to learn that her longtime next-door neighbor, Danny Longo, was among the eight dead in Sunday's crash on the Taconic State Parkway.

"I don't know what to say," she said after a brief pause. "He was a quiet but a smart man. I just can't believe it."

Silverberg said that her husband, a war veteran, died five years ago and that Longo, also a veteran, reached out to her.

"I've been here for 53 years," she said. "I used to have these dark chocolate bars in my house that I gave him. I used to give him chocolate bars and he'd always say 'Oh, this is good!' "

Longo was riding in a Chevy Trailblazer with Michael Bastardi and Bastardi's son, Guy Bastardi, both of Yonkers, when a Ford minivan heading the wrong way on the parkway crashed into their vehicle.

Guy Bastardi was single and lived with his father.

"He loved life," Roseann Guzzo said, adding that her brother took after her father in many ways.

"We were a tightly knit family," said Michael Bastardi's son-in-law, Bob Guzzo of Yorktown. "We did everything together - vacations, parties, everything."

Longo and the Bastardis were heading to Guzzo's Yorktown home on Sunday for a dinner party.

"They were late getting here and my wife was trying to get a hold of them on their cell phones," he said. "As time went on, we asked another relative if they left yet and someone told us there was a bad accident on the Taconic. So I said, 'Maybe they're stuck in traffic.' So I looked on the news and saw my brother-in-law's car. Then I went to my wife and told her 'We're in store for some really bad news.' "