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An 18-year-old woman was fatally struck by a train early Tuesday after she suffered a sudden medical episode and fell onto the tracks at a Queens subway station – leaving her heartbroken family in shock.
Jessica Marleny Ajtzac Guarcas was on her way to her job at a nearby restaurant when she collapsed at the Roosevelt Avenue-74th Street station in Jackson Heights around 6:40 a.m., and fell onto the Manhattan-bound E train tracks, according to authorities and her family.
Surveillance footage showed the young woman standing among other passengers on the platform as a train pulled in, with her hands in her pockets, police said.
“And suddenly she just falls from the crowd onto the tracks,” NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny said at a press briefing later Tuesday. “She just kind of steps forward onto the yellow part of the platform and just falls.”
The chief said it appeared as though the teen had “passed out” and that no criminality was suspected.
Relatives cops spoke to said she had an ongoing medical condition, Kenny added, without providing specifics.
But her older sister, Maria Ajtzac Guarcas, told The Post that the teen had not been sick, and that the family was in the dark about what exactly had caused her deadly fall.
“We did not expect it, we never expected death and nothing can be done,” Maria said.
The youngest of three sisters, Jessica was originally from Guatemala and had only been in the US for two years. She lived with a female friend and was working making empanadas at a Queens restaurant to help support her family, her relatives said.
“She wasn’t sick when she went to work this morning. We didn’t know,” middle sister Cristina Ajtzac Guarcas, 21, said in Spanish. “We want to know what actually happened to her… We don’t know and we want to know.”
Jessica — who was traveling alone — was discovered lying on the roadbed, unconscious and unresponsive, with trauma to her body, police said.
She was pronounced dead at the train station by EMS workers.
Cristina described her baby sister as a good worker who “dressed well,” and was just “a normal person.”
“There was no bad thing,” she said.
Their older sister Maria was tearful as her husband, Angel Sen Soliz, held her outside their former Queens home, later telling The Post that when she broke the news to their parents who are back in Guatemala, “they couldn’t believe my sister died” and that she, too, believed it was “a lie” at first.
“She was a good, responsible girl… she came to us [to] visit us on her day off… she never gave us any problems,” Maria said.
Sen Soliz also described his sister-in-law as a “good girl” who “came to the US two years ago to help her family have a better life.”
“She sends money to her parents, both in Guatemala, who I just told she had died,” he said.
Additional reporting by Juan Arellano
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