By Zach Patberg
The driver of the other car, Joseph Kane, of Fresh Meadows, initially fled the scene but later turned himself in to the 107th Precinct, according to police.The grisly accident happened around 5 a.m., when St. John's sophomores Savita Singh and Adeeb Mannan and NYU student Anuj Agarwal, of Syosset, L.I., were on their to way to eat after leaving a friend's house, family and friends said.Rescue workers spent nearly two hours trying to extricate the three victims from the 1994 Toyota Celica that wrapped around the tree.Singh, 20, of the Bronx, and Mannan, 19, of Jamaica, were the latest of three St. John's students who have died in car wrecks on the LIE in less than three weeks. Sophomore Maria Kaliakmanis was killed Feb. 20 by an out-of-control car that hit her while she was helping a woman stranded on the shoulder in Shirley, L.I.Singh's college friends described the pharmacy student as a dedicated and “very sweet girl” who was always around for those who needed her.Mannan's father, Mohammed Mannan, said his son, a physics major with a full scholarship to St. John's, planned to go to medical school for ophthalmology after graduation.His family and friends considered Mannan brilliant.”I was in college and he would teach me physics while in high school,” said his older sister, Mredula, 22, who flew in Saturday from the Caribbean where she attends medical school.”I would sit next to him in class so I could cheat,” confessed Mannan's college roommate, Omar Ishtiaque, sitting next to Mredula at the dining room table inside the family's Jamaica home Monday.When the two best friends were not hanging out on campus, Mannan, a voracious reader, could be found breezing through textbooks and fantasy novels.”He read the fourth Harry Potter in one night,” Ishtiaque recalled.In the last few months before he died, the young Bangladeshi had turned to the Islamic faith out of a need to quell a rising unhappiness and a feeling that “something was missing,” his friends said.”He would pray every morning,” said his father, a civil engineer who emigrated from Bangladesh when Mannan was in fifth grade.Hundreds of people and a 15-car procession accompanied Mannan's funeral service Sunday at the Jamaica Muslim Center. Nasir Khan, a family friend, said that in the 23 years he has been involved with the mosque he had never seen it so packed.”He was a popular kid, you know,” he said.The driver of the other car, Kane, 50, of 61-38 171st St., was charged with leaving the scene of an accident and driving without a valid license and faces up to four years in jail, the Queens district attorney's office said. Ishtiaque, who was with Mannan earlier that fatal night, said he spoke with his friend 15 minutes before the accident. “He called to ask if I wanted to come eat with him. He said he'd call back when they got there. But he never called.”Reach reporter Zach Patberg by e-mail at news@timesledger.com or by phone at 718-229-0300, Ext. 155.
