Weird Story of the Day

A pedestrian was struck and killed by a car in Queens. That's not the weird part. The weird part is that another car then struck the body and dragged it for more than an hour and 17 miles before someone finally noticed and got the van to stop.

The corpse's gruesome journey began when the man was hit while trying to cross 108th St. in Corona and did not end until the van driver finally noticed the body in Brighton Beach, police said.

Thinking he smelled something burning, the cargo van's driver pulled over once along the way, but did not discover the body until other motorists flagged him down on Brighton 10th Terrace an hour later, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said.

"People were signaling him to stop the vehicle," Kelly said. "That's when the body is discovered under his car."

Investigators believe the dead man - whose body was too mangled to immediately identify - was trying to cross 108th St. near 51st Ave., when an SUV driver ran him down just after 6 a.m.

A maroon Chevy van was a few cars behind the SUV and its driver later told detectives he noticed that other vehicles were swerving to avoid something in the road, police sources said.

The van's driver, identified by sources as Manual Gaspar Latuna Sanchez of Corona, thought they were trying to avoid a pothole and kept driving straight ahead - inadvertently picking up the body.

Investigators believe the body got stuck in the van's chassis, so when the driver of the SUV pulled over to call 911 that he hit someone, the victim had already vanished.

Oblivious to the body underneath his van, Sanchez got on the Grand Central Parkway a few blocks away and then drove south on the Van Wyck Expressway and west on the Belt Parkway before exiting in Brighton Beach.

Unbelievable. No charges are expected against either the driver that originally struck the pedestrian or the driver of the van that took the body on the 17 mile joyride stuck to its chassis.