A young driver’s death on the Garden State Parkway remains under investigation, months after the single-vehicle crash that took his life. Scott Sanczyk of Kinnelon was 20 when his Mercedes-Benz SUV went off the northbound Parkway past the 109.6 milepost at Tinton Falls, in Monmouth County, on a Saturday morning in late March. The SUV drifted left off the roadway, hit a guiderail and rolled over, throwing him clear of the wreck. He died at the scene.
State police units rolled up at roughly 6:12 a.m. Sgt. Jeffrey Lebron, the state police spokesperson, confirmed the sequence — the vehicle drifting left, the guiderail, the rollover — and one merciful fact: no other vehicles were involved. Nobody else was hurt because nobody else was there.
A Life Remembered In Two Sports
By published records, Sanczyk played on the Kinnelon High School golf team, in his home borough in Morris County — a wooded, tightly knit community in the Highlands region, about 35 miles west of New York City. School athletics there are a point of local pride, and Sanczyk had left his mark in a second sport too: he rolled a perfect game for the school’s bowling side in 2023, the rarest of feats at that age.
The distance between his hometown and the crash site is a familiar New Jersey journey. Tinton Falls sits roughly 50 miles south of New York City in the Monmouth County Shore region, along the Parkway corridor that carries shore traffic toward the metropolitan area, particularly on weekend mornings. The section near milepost 109.6 is heavily traveled even on Saturdays.
The Investigation
The Fatal Accident Investigation Unit of the New Jersey State Police leads the case. Sgt. Lebron confirmed that no additional information would be released pending its outcome, and investigators have given no indication of what role, if any, speed, driver impairment, distraction or a mechanical fault might have played. What is established is the outline: one vehicle, one guiderail, a rollover severe enough to eject the driver, and a young man dead before rescuers could change the story.
The setting gives the numbers their weight. The Garden State Parkway runs about 173 miles between the New York line and Cape May, carrying tens of millions of vehicles a year under the New Jersey Turnpike Authority’s administration. Monmouth County alone, spanning about 472 square miles from the Raritan Bay to the Manasquan River, recorded dozens of traffic fatalities across 2025 on its highways and local roads.
The family has announced no funeral arrangements publicly. State police ask anyone with possible information about the crash to come forward to them. For the Kinnelon community, where one family’s son is remembered for a perfect game and a spot on the golf roster, the investigation’s eventual findings will matter less than the loss itself — another weekend morning on a New Jersey highway that ended before it began.
