Young Woman Trapped Inside Car During Buffalo Blizzard For 18 Hours Found Dead

On Christmas Eve, a 22 year-old woman was found dead after being trapped for nearly a full day in her car during the historic blizzard last weekend in Buffalo, New York.

Anndel Taylor from Charlotte, North Carolina was driving home on Friday afternoon after work when her car became stranded for at least 18 hours in the snowstorm. Local media reports that she was not injured. After living with her family in Charlotte for 20 years, the young woman moved to Buffalo earlier this year to take care of her father.

Wanda Brown Steele, Taylor’s mother, told WSOC she believes her daughter died from carbon monoxide poisoning rather than hypothermia. The official cause of Taylor’s death is not yet known.

“The car was running, and the snow was still coming, so it blocked the pipes, the exhaust pipe,” Wanda Brown Steele, Taylor’s mother, told WSOC. “Then, after the car cut off, that’s when she iced up.”

Steele explained to the outlet that Steele’s daughter called 911 emergency services for help. She said her daughter planned to stay in bed during the blizzard, and then walk home. Taylor couldn’t be reached by authorities due to the more than 40 inches snow falling on western New York during the Christmas weekend. Kathy Hochul “the blizzard of the century.”

The mother alerted her family in Buffalo to look for Taylor.

“That’s when they busted open the window and seen that she was in there,” Steele claimed that, according to The New York Post.

Shawnequa Brown, Taylor’s sister, told WCOS that she “was telling my sister that she was scared.”

Taylor sat in her vehicle while she waited, and sent her family two videos. She showed her car’s windshield covered with snow, then slightly rolled down her window to show how treacherous the weather was.

Taylor was one of the 28 victims in the storm, which some reports said was the worst to hit Buffalo in 45-years. It was also close to the 1977 blizzard which killed almost 30 people.

Officials fear that the death toll from the winter storm that ravaged the city will rise, even though it was over by Christmas morning.

Sylvia Taylor, Taylor’s grandmother, told WSOC-TV: “It’s so easy to ask yourself, ‘Why, God? Why?”

“But it’s not always meant for us to know the answer to that,” She spoke.

Family members told The Post that Taylor’s 23rd birthday was coming soon.

She “still got presents under the tree” for Christmas,” Shawnequa Brown said.

Brown called Brown “sister” “the golden child … The funniest, the realist, the hoodest little sister ever!”

“I’m so so so sorry, I would do anything to have been there with you,” According to The Post, she wrote.