Friend of Teens Who Died While Streaming on Facebook Live Was Dropped at Home Before Deadly Crash: ‘It Doesn’t Feel Real’

Samantha Kelly-Piasecki was riding with her best friends Brooke Miranda Hughes and Chaniya Morrison-Toomey on Monday night when she asked to be dropped off at home.

“Brooke texted me asking if I wanted to come back out with her, but I said I had work in the morning,” Kelly-Piasceki, 17, tells PEOPLE.

It was the last time the Scranton, Pennsylvania, teen would hear from her friends, who were on their way to the Poconos, according to Kelly-Piasceki. At 3 a.m., her phone began ringing nonstop and she received a text message that read: “Look on Brooke’s wall.”

Eyes still bleary from sleep, Kelly-Piasceki went to Hughes’ wall and played the most recent post, a Facebook Live video streamed just after midnight.

“Chaniya was in the video and she asked Brooke, ‘Are you going live?’ And then Brooke picked up her head like she was going to say something,” Kelly-Piasceki says.

But before Hughes could answer, lights flashed inside the car, then came the sound of screeching tires. Then the screen went black.

The video captured the pair’s final moments before a tractor-trailer smashed into the rear end of their car and killed both in a fiery wreck.

“It was heartbreaking,” Kelly-Piasceki said of seeing the video. “I felt as if I was dreaming. It still doesn’t feel real.”

State police investigators said the teens were traveling slowly in the right lane of the I-380 near Tobyhanna, Pennsylvania, the Scranton Times-Tribune reported. They were both declared dead at the scene and were driving on a spare tire, according to Pennsylvania State Trooper Dave Peters.

Michael Jay Parks, the driver of the tractor-trailer, was unharmed in the deadly accident. Investigators told the newspaper it was too early to determine if Parks will be charged.

Kelly-Piasceki is heartbroken over the loss of her friends and unable to let go of the thought that if she had stayed with them she could have somehow prevented this tragedy.

“If I was in the car and they were telling me, ‘Let’s go to the Poconos,’ I would have been like ‘No, Brooke you’ve got school in the morning. Let’s not,’ ” she says.

The three teens had worked together at Long John Silvers and Hughes had recently re-enrolled in high school.

“Brooke was just trying to get her life back together,” Kelly-Piasceki says. “She wanted to go to school to become a nurse.”

She remembers both young women as “beautiful.”

“They both had smiles that could light up dark rooms,” she says.

“They had great personalities and their laughs were the type of laugh to make you laugh too,” she continues.

For now, Kelly-Piasceki is trying to focus on the good times the three women shared. “They were always there when I needed them,” she says. “There was never a time they turned their backs on me.

An investigation into the crash is ongoing.