A Guitar, A Contagious Laugh, Silenced: Turnpike Crash Victims Remembered

“How many nights have you wished someone would stay?
Lie awake only hoping they’re okay.” -- “Infinity,” by One Direction

When Chris Calderone and Rob Critelli were in the same room, their friends say, no one stood a chance.

Laughter was sure to ensue. And smiles. And the kinds of happy memories that make minutes blend into hours and days and weeks spent together feel like months and years.

“They had similar personalities,” said Eva Motto, who was one of a group of about 10 friends that included both Calderone and Critelli who spent the summer hanging out.

“Rob is one of those people that when he comes into your life, he changes you from the second you meet him,” said Caitie Sherbo.

“(Chris) was an easy person to be around and easy person to want in your life,“ Motto said.

Both had a gift for making people laugh -- Calderone (who almost always had a guitar in his hands) singing, doing voices and impressions, Critelli through wisecracks and especially his laughter.

“I can’t put into words how awesome it was,” wrote Bryce Petraccoro, who had known Rob Critelli going back to high school. “It was so contagious and unforgettable, just like him.”

“It was almost like a baby’s laugh and a giggle,” Motto said.

And when the two were together?

“Chris would do something, and if Rob thought it was funny, no one had a chance,” Motto said. “You were going to laugh,” with the kind of laughter that just builds on itself until you’re laughing just because the laughter is funny.

The group of friends had many nights like that this summer, such as the one celebrating the birthdays of both Motto and Critelli, Sherbo said. “I threw the party at my house and we stayed up until 4 a.m., just hanging out. That was the night I realized how special this group was.”

Those nights often consisted of playing board games, watching movies and listening to Chris playing guitar -- “He didn’t need sheet music,” she said, ”he could just hear something and then play it” -- and simply being together, Motto said. They were even granted one last summery night together on Saturday night.

“It was beautiful. It did not feel like November,” Motto said.

Now, the tight-knit circle of friends is preparing to attend the funerals of both, after Chris Calderone and Rob Critelli were killed in Monday’s fiery crash on the New Jersey Turnpike in South Jersey. The two -- along with Paul Fiorentino -- were headed to the University of Delaware, where Chris’s girlfriend Leah Amici is a student, to attend the Walk the Moon concert.

Calderone, a Brick Township resident, was 20 years old. Critelli, who lived in Summit but was a graduate of Point Pleasant Beach, was 21.

Fiorentino, 21, of Point Pleasant Beach, was injured in the crash, which New Jersey State Police have said happened when the Volkswagen Passat Fiorentino was driving was rear-ended by a Toyota Avalon driven by Nishank Shaw, 24, of Woodbridge while the Passat was stopped behind a Toyota Sienna driven by Igor Lougovtsov, 46, of Yarmouth, Maine.

Lougovtsov had stopped in the left lane, which was closed at the time, police said. The impact of the crash drove the Passat into the Sienna, and caused the Passat to burst into flames, killing the two close friends, State Police said.

Calderone and Fiorentino were members of the band Fated Endeavor, which formed in March and had released its first album, Chasing Sunlight, in July. Fiorentino was the lead vocalist, while Calderone provided backup vocals and played guitar.

The two had joined Nick Perez, the drummer and programmer, and Chris Bevacqua, keyboardist and bassist, who had begun writing original music in late 2014, according to the band’s website.

“The band chose the name ’Fated Endeavor’ on April 26th, 2015 to resemble a life’s journey,” the website said. The music is a mix of dance and rock, and the band had hopes of evolving its sound. They had begun to have some success, including reaching the semifinals of the Rock to the Top competition at The Stone Pony, where they were scheduled to play next Sunday, Nov. 22. Lyrics from the songs they had produced so far -- You can find them on the group’s YouTube channel, here -- were a mix of hope and frustration, joy and despair -- but with a message of not giving up.

The band was part of what brought the larger group together, Motto said. Nick Perez worked with Acacia Evans, Motto said, and the two became friends, and their friends -- including Calderone and Critelli -- became part of that bigger circle.

“Everyone getting together, it fit so perfectly,” she said. “No one was out of place. Everyone was so connected to everyone else.”

That much is apparent when you look through the group’s various social media accounts -- a connectedness that has now left so many with a grief beyond words.

“I can’t believe it’s real,” Bevacqua posted on Facebook, as he shared a group photo that pops up on many of the friends’ pages and Twitter accounts. “You two were such a huge part of my life and it all just changed in the blink of an eye with no warning, you will never be forgotten and I’m so grateful for every moment we had, save me a place up there boys I love you❤ — with Chris Calderone and Rob Critelli.”

“I miss my brothers,” Evans tweeted, with a photo of the two. Other friends retweeted favorite tweets from the pair, from funny, sometimes off-color quips to some of their more deep thoughts, including this one from Critelli that speaks volumes about how friends and family are feeling now:

“There was never a day we weren’t together (over the summer),” Sherbo said. “Just the other day Chris was saying how important our group of friends were.”

Critelli, she said, was the one who encouraged her and so many others to be themselves.

“He said I shouldn’t listen to anyone and I was worth something,” Sherbo said, adding that he had been someone she could always turn to when things were rough.

“He was the person I would call when I was going through something like this, and it’s weird that I can’t,” she said.

Critelli, a 2012 graduate of Point Pleasant Beach High School who received the Presidential Award for Academics, was a junior at Fairleigh Dickinson University, where he was in the midst of changing majors but had a goal of working on Wall Street, according to his obituary. He had spent two summers working as a bookkeeper for Summit Industrial Hardware and was eager for the future, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Calderone, a 2014 graduate of Monsignor Donovan High School who played varsity baseball there, had been a dean’s list student at Felician College, according to his obituary, but transferred to Ocean County College so he could put more time and effort into the band, Motto said.

“Everyone who knew him (Chris) knew he wouldn’t be happy with anything other than playing,” she said, adding that the guitar was constantly in his hands. “We’d have to turn his amp (amplifier) off if we wanted him to stop so we could go somewhere,” she said.

It wasn’t just their group of friends, however, who mattered deeply to them, friends said. Calderone was very close to his family, and would plop down in the kitchen and have long conversations with his parents, Brenda and Lewis, and brother David, Motto said. ”He was so protective of (David),” she said. Calderone also is survived by his grandmother, Joan Hadland, according to his obituary.

Critelli was equally close to his family, often tweeting about his parents, joking about his mother, Anna, teasing him when she pulled up in a new Mercedes, and his dad, Al, calling him to ask him where his mother was: “I ain’t her keeper I don’t know what she does with her day,” he joked.

Critelli, who recently had been accepted into Phi Sigma Kappa, also is survived by his sister Patricia Kisch and her husband, David; his sister Nicole Nieves, and his brother Alfie Critelli, and nephews and a niece, Anthony and Michael Nieves, and Grace and Jack Kisch, according to his obituary.

The fraternity, which has a marathon softball fundraiser scheduled for this weekend, announced it will go on and will honor Critelli, with proceeds going to Valerie’s Fund for Camp Happy Times, a summer camp for children with terminal illnesses, which the Critelli family named as a place to send memorial donations in lieu of flowers.

Their legacy, however, will be the way they touched the lives of everyone around them, their friends said. Petraccoro, in a blog post paying tribute to the two, said she had a newfound understanding of what love should be from seeing how Calderone treated Amici when she met him for the first time as the group hung out at the Under the Sun tour at The Stone Pony in Asbury Park.

“Just from looking at him, I could see in his eyes how deeply he loved and cared about Leah,“ she wrote. “I didn’t think there were guys like that out there anymore. ... Thank you for teaching me what true happiness and love really is.”

“Chris Calderone will always be the love of my life and Rob Critelli will always be the funniest best friend I’ve ever had,” Leah Amici wrote on her Twitter profile.

Calderone hoped to inspire the world:

Their friends will have the memory of that one last summer evening, a gift on November night where summer temperatures are unheard of.

“We went to the beach to shoot part of a music video,” said Motto, who handles photography and PR for the band. “We met up with Rob and Matt (Aiken, another of Critelli’s close friends) and kind of hung out for a couple of hours.”

“It was a beautiful night,” she said.

“I don’t think there’s a isn’t a single person in the group who isn’t heartbroken over this,” Motto said. ”It’s just extra hard -- you’re hurting for yourself and you’re hurting for the people that you love.”

It’s a pain summed up by the lyrics from the One Direction song “Infinity” that Evans tweeted: “How many nights have you wished someone would stay?Lie awake only hoping they’re okay.”

It happens to be a song Fated Endeavor had recently covered, as they worked on expanding their sound. Watch that performance, from their You Tube channel, below.

Services for Calderone are Friday, 2-4 p.m. and 7-9 p.m. at O’Brien Funeral Home, 505 Burnt Tavern Road, Brickwith a Mass of Christian Burial at Church of the Epiphany, 615 Thiel Road, Brick beginning at 8 a.m. on Saturday.

Critelli’s visitation is Friday from 4-8 p.m. at Paul Ippolito Berkeley Memorial funeral home, 646 Springfield Ave, Berkeley Heights. His funeral Mass begins at 9:30 a.m. Saturday at St. Teresa of Avila Church, Morris Ave, Summit.

Photos courtesy of Eva Motto.

Donations to the Valerie Fund, Camp Happy Times, can be sent to the camp at; 2101 Millburn Ave, Maplewood, NJ 07040.

Editor's note: This article originally was published Nov. 13, 2015. It was updated June 4, 2017 to fix type that had disappeared.