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NEW YORK (CBS) ― Faithful to the very end. The husband of the Long Island woman who killed eight people in the fiery wrong-way Taconic State Parkway crash in July is again defending his wife. He refuses to believe she was drunk and he wants her body exhumed. His comments Tuesday night on "Larry King Live" have outraged victims' families, who are asking Daniel Schuler to just let the whole matter rest.

Rosann Guzzo and Margie Nicotina, the daughters of Michael Bastardi Sr. and sisters of Guy Bastardi, the two men killed along with friend Dan Longo in the fiery wreck, watched Larry King and heard Schuler's declarations about his wife. They told CBS 2 just how it made them feel.

"At first, anger. Anger, a lot of it. We're tired of hearing it, enough is enough," said Guzzo.

Added Nicotina: "It brings it all back, and they keep denying it. The fact is she drank an excessive amount of alcohol, she smoked pot, and got in the car – with kids in the car. She killed our father, our brother, and our friend. Nothing is gonna change that."

The Bastardi and Longo families have repeatedly said they don't want to be dragged into a war of words with Schuler, that the autopsy results which showed the alcohol and marijuana levels in Diane Schuler should speak for itself.

But when statements like Mr. Schuler are made, they say the record has to be set straight.

"We all lost loved ones. She wasn't drunk. It was a tragic accident," he said on the show.

Mike Bastardi Jr. also issued a statement on Schuler's comments: "Daniel Schuler wants to get to the truth, then that will happen when [Mr. Schuler and his lawyer] start telling the truth."

Mr. Schuler said he planned on exhuming the body of his wife, which the victims' families say they are OK with.

"If they want to exhume the body, they can, but I think they should also take a hair sample to see how long she was smoking pot," said Guzzo.

But Schuler's attorney, Dominic Barbara, made an additional comment that disgusted the victims' families.

"When Barbara said that 60 percent of America thinks she wasn't drunk I would love to know where he got that figure, did he go into a bar and interview 10 people and six of them said that, I mean where did that statistic come from?" asked Guzzo. "Read the blogs. Most of the people agree with the Bastardis and the Longos and the facts from the state police, the DA and the Medical Examiner. That's the facts."

It may well be that the increasing anger is only going to be settled in the civil suit that the Bastardis and Longos are bringing in court.

"It's impossible to describe what we're going through. We don't sleep. One minute we're really angry and like the next minute we're so depressed that we sit in here and we know we have a thousand things to do and we get nothing done," said Nicotina. "We get nothing done. Like this isn't really happening. This didn't happen."

By "a thousand things to do here," what the sisters mean is that because their brother and father were killed, the house where they grew up – now, since the crash – they have to get it ready to be sold. And doing that brings it all back.

The sisters also want to make sure that no one loses sight of Bryan Schuler, the 5-year-old boy who was the only survivor of the crash. Their thoughts they say are always with him.



 

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