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Moments after a 74-year-old woman's car cut a deadly swath through crowded Washington Square Park yesterday afternoon, the anguished driver blamed a stuck gas pedal for the deaths of four people and injuries to at least 27 others.
"I couldn't stop. I couldn't stop. I couldn't stop," a witness said the driver, Stella Maychick, cried.
The park was packed with hundreds of New York University students and faculty drawn by an annual spring cleanup and other visitors enjoying the idyllic 78-degree spring afternoon when Maychick's gray 1987 Oldsmobile Delta 88 hurtled into the park at 3:18 p.m., witnesses and police said.
The car, which some witnesses said was "flying" at better than 60 miles an hour, hurled people into the air and uprooted freshly painted park benches before stopping about 150 feet inside the Greenwich Village park, witnesses and police said.
Sources said last night that Maychick told police, "I put my foot on the accelerator and the engine just kept going. It went by itself."
Police were investigating whether the accelerator of the Delta 88 was defective. In 1988, the Oldsmobile model was the subject of a recall following federal investigations into acceleration problems. It was not known last night whether Maychick's auto had been recalled.
Capt. Donald Kelly said last night at a Sixth Precinct news conference, "There will be no criminal charges filed. This was a tragic accident." Kelly said the investigation is continuing.
Kelly said the driver made no statement, but is in shock. "She's terribly, terribly upset," and was hospitalized last night for trauma, he said.
"She was saying, `I couldn't stop. I couldn't stop. I couldn't stop,' " said one witness, Gita Ramani of Manhattan.
Four people died in the crash, including two elderly women and two young men, officials said.
One of the women and a man believed to be in his 30s died at the scene. The other woman, identified by...