The minivan's front end appeared to have been almost entirely smashed in, and its shell was scorched and bent. At least one wheel was blown out.
The minivan was smoking, and a fire spread from under the vehicle, throughout its shell, within minutes.
The woman driving the minivan and four of the five children inside it were killed, Becerra said. They were part of a family from Floral Park and West Babylon, on Long Island.
The children who died were girls ages 2, 5, 7 and 9. The fifth child, a boy, age 5, was hospitalized.
The minivan's driver was the mother of the surviving child, and the other children were her nieces and her daughter, Becerra said.
A witness, Katrina Dedvukaj, who was traveling north on the parkway to a family barbecue in Mahopac, said she saw the accident in her rearview mirror.
"One car goes this way, one goes that way, up in the air, both of them," she said. "I was crying. I was shaking."
Her brother, Peter Dedvukaj, driving in another vehicle, said he saw smoke ahead and traffic came to a standstill.
"People were getting out to help, shouting, 'We need help! We need help!"' Dedvukaj said. "Everybody said, 'There are kids in the car."'
He said he and others opened a door of the minivan and "there was a body in front of us." He said they helped pull out the children they could see -- two girls, who appeared to be dead, and a boy, who was kicking and screaming.
Hawthorne fire Chief Joe LaGrippo, among the first emergency responders to arrive at the scene of the accident, in the tiny village of Briarcliff Manor, said the boy suffered significant head trauma.
LaGrippo said that when he got there the minivan was engulfed in flames. He said one of the children was dead, and three others were near death.
"We go out quite frequently, but thank God we've never seen anything of this magnitude," LaGrippo said. "You just don't get used to these kinds of calls."
Three men from Yonkers in the SUV were killed, Becerra said. Two people in the third vehicle were hospitalized.
The parkway, which stretches about 100 miles from Valhalla, in Westchester County, to East Chatham, in Columbia County, was closed to traffic in both directions in the area for hours following the afternoon crash.
It was the second wrong-way crash on the parkway on Sunday, and police said they didn't know why either driver was going in the wrong direction or where the drivers entered the parkway. Five people were injured in an early morning collision between two vehicles, one of which was headed northbound in the southbound lanes. That accident occurred about 20 miles north of the later incident.
Four people died in a crash on Long Island's Montauk Highway in Copiague on Sunday.
The scenic Taconic State Parkway was built over a number of years in stages beginning in the early 1920s, initially as an extension of the Bronx Parkway from New York City to Bear Mountain Bridge.
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