WARRENSBURG, NY (AP) -- A man has been charged with drunken driving and vehicular homicide after his SUV veered into a group of people standing near a rural road in upstate New York, killing two British employees of a summer camp, state police said Friday.
The two - a counselor and a camp office worker - were with other employees standing by a road near Camp Echo Lake just before 11:30 p.m. Thursday in Warrensburg.
Troopers identified the victims as 21-year-old Dominic Hartley and 21-year-old Emily Lewis. Tony Stein, the owner and director of the camp, said Hartley was a counselor from England and Lewis, who worked in the camp office, was from Aberdeen, Scotland. Hartley's hometown wasn't immediately available. Another counselor - Christopher Jones, 28, of Wakefield, England - was treated for minor injuries.
The driver, Peter Goldblatt, 39, of Indian Lake, was arraigned Friday morning on charges of driving while intoxicated and aggravated vehicular homicide. He declined to comment to a news reporter as he was driven off to jail, where he was being held on $500,000 bail.
Stein said Hartley and Lewis were in their first summer at the 135-acre camp in the southern Adirondacks about 60 miles north of Albany. They had been at the camp for the past two or three weeks for training and orientation and had joined other workers for an evening out, he said.
"The staff on their free time often walk to and from town," a distance of a mile or less, Stein said.
He said they were hanging out on the side of road when they were hit.
Witnesses told the Glens Falls Post-Star that the sport utility vehicle continued on after hitting the pedestrians and stopped a few hundred feet away. They said the driver tried unsuccessfully to restart it before police arrived.
Campers weren't scheduled to arrive until Saturday. Stein said the camp has been in touch with parents to help prepare their children.
"Echo Lake has been around for 65 years. It's a tight-knit community," he said.
Grief counselors were brought in for camp workers.
"Any time you have a loss like this in a community this size, it's tough," Stein said.
(Copyright ©2010 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
