The 6-year-old daughter of Closer magazine editor Annabel Vered was killed on Father’s Day after she darted out in front of a car outside their summer home in the Hamptons.
Tess Burstein was playing in the front yard as the family was having a barbecue, when she sprinted across Blank Street in Water Mill about 11 a.m. to meet a friend. She was hit by a neighbor driving a Toyota Prius, the New York Post reported.
The child’s uncle called the tragedy “the worst thing a father can have on Father’s Day.”
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“He’s not very well,’’ Amit Burstein said of his brother, UBS investment banker Josef Burstein, 46, the Post reported.
“She was an amazing girl, a very beautiful girl, very happy, very smart,’’ the uncle said of Tess. “It’s a shock for everyone, a big, big loss.’’
The driver, 76-year-old Maurice Wittenberg, called it the “worst day” of his life.
“I feel it wasn’t my fault, but it’s still a terrible thing to know you’ve killed an innocent little child,” he told the Post.
Next-door neighbor Susan Infantino, 66, told the Post: “I was in my backyard and I heard the parents screaming, ’No! No! Oh, my God! Oh, my God!’”
“They were blood-curdling screams you know could only come from a parent,” she said. “I yelled over, ’What happened What happened?’ And she said, ’My daughter just got hit by a car!’”
Mrs. Infantino said her husband “tried to console the parents, tried to keep them away from the child … They were totally distraught.”
A nurse who was driving by reportedly stopped and gave the child CPR, but the girl later died at the hospital.
Mrs. Vered, 43, worked at Life&Style, Star and InTouch magazines before taking the helm of the celebrity weekly Closer last year, the Post reported.
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