Streetsblog New York City

Sook-Ja Kim was struck from behind by a motorist who drove across a wide median on Mosholu Parkway. Photo: Norwood News

A woman was struck and killed by a driver who jumped the curb and drove across a field near the Bronx Botanical Garden last weekend.

Sook-Ja Kim, 63, was in a wide grassy median that serves as a park area on Mosholu Parkway near Bainbridge Avenue when she was hit from behind by a motorist at around 3:45 p.m. on Sunday, March 17.

NYPD told the media that the driver, a 22-year-old man whose name was not released, had a seizure and “lost control” of the Honda sedan he was driving.

“I saw the car cross the highway and driving in the wrong direction. He was going like 100 miles-per-hour, yes. The guy was sick or something was wrong with the young driver,” said witness Marcelino Hernandez to the Norwood News, which published a thorough account of the crash.

The story says that on Saturday “a large group of children” played football on the field where Kim was struck.

“I cross here all the time with my kids,” Hernandez said about the area of the parkway at Bainbridge Avenue. “It’s not safe, you’re not suppose to play there. Nobody should be there. This roadway is very dangerous.”

Having learned that there was speculation that the driver had an epileptic seizure, Hernandez said he felt new laws should be created for drivers who take medication when they shouldn’t, or drivers who don’t take medication when they should.

Kim died at St. Barnabas Hospital. No charges were filed against the driver, and no summonses were issued.

Sook-Ja Kim was at least the third NYC pedestrian killed by a curb-jumping motorist in the last month. Martha Atwater was struck outside a shop in Cobble Hill by a driver who police said had a diabetic seizure. An unidentified woman was hit on a sidewalk in Kips Bay after two drivers collided on Third Avenue. No charges were filed for either of those deaths.

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A stencil memorializes Martha Atwater, who was killed when a pickup truck driver jumped the curb and crushed her on the sidewalk in Brooklyn Heights. NYPD said that "no criminality is suspected." Photo: Time's Up!

Last night, a group of activists traveled to the sites of eight traffic fatalities and stenciled paint memorials for those who lost their lives walking or biking in crashes for which NYPD declared “no criminality suspected” within hours of the crash. This morning, Time’s Up! led a memorial bike ride to the eight crash sites.

In a plea for justice from Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, the stencil memorials ask, ”Why, Ray, Why?”

Memorials were stenciled for:

• Mike Rogalle, killed on the sidewalk by an SUV driver who jumped the curb on Beekman Street in Lower Manhattan last April.
• An unidentified woman, who was struck and killed by a private dump truck driver in January while she was biking on East 23rd Street near Madison Avenue.
• Mir Hossain, a taxi driver who was standing next to his vehicle in January when a speeding SUV driver rear-ended his double-parked cab, sending him flying to the ground and killing him.
• An unidentified woman, killed in February after a two-car crash sent one of the vehicles onto the sidewalk at Third Avenue and East 27th Street, where she was standing.
• Rubin Baum, killed in September by a driver who ran a red light at Park Avenue and East 59th Street. Baum pushed his wife out of the way of the oncoming driver, saving her life before he was pinned beneath the vehicle.
• Ryo Oyamada, killed by the driver of an NYPD cruiser on 40th Avenue near 10th Street in Queensbridge in February.
• Martha Atwater, killed by a pickup truck driver on the sidewalk at the corner of Clinton Street and Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn in February.
• Tenzin Drudak, killed by a distracted driver on the sidewalk at 30th Street and Thompson Avenue in Long Island City on Monday.

In all of these cases, NYPD declared there was “no criminality suspected” of the driver. While NYPD has recently modified how it handles crash investigations, results have yet to be seen.

A Brooklyn woman who was struck by a truck driver in Red Hook Wednesday was the latest victim among six city pedestrian and cyclist fatalities in the last week.

Lillian Cruz, hit by the driver of a tractor-trailer in Red Hook Wednesday, was at least the fifth pedestrian killed by a city motorist since Ray Kelly announced changes to the NYPD crash investigation squad. Image: News12 via Gothamist

At approximately 6:40 a.m. yesterday, Lillian Cruz, 60, was crossing Hamilton Avenue at Court Street when the signal changed and the driver of a tractor-trailer, westbound on Hamilton and stopped at the light, accelerated and ran her over, according to NYPD.

Cruz, of Bushwick, died at the scene. The driver was summonsed for failure to exercise due care.

Cruz was at least the second pedestrian killed by a semi truck driver in the last two weeks, following the February 28 death of 6-year-old Amar Diarrassouba. Tractor-trailer drivers have killed at least three other pedestrians on city streets since last August, according to crash data compiled by Streetsblog. The victims include Ignacio Cubano, Ken Baker, and Jessica Dworkin.

Many of the trucks involved in these fatal collisions are too long to be operated on surface streets without a permit. Despite recent deaths, the presence of trucks in areas that should normally be off-limits has not been a focus of NYPD or the media.

Monday evening at around 8 p.m., 75-year-old Roberto Baez was struck by the driver of a Nissan in the Bronx. Baez was crossing Soundview Avenue mid-block near Taylor Avenue when he was killed, a police spokesperson said. No summonses were issued.

Monday morning, 16-year-old Tenzin Drudak was among several people hit by a curb-jumping motorist near LaGuardia Community College in Long Island City. Drudak was killed and four others were injured. NYPD told the media the driver was speeding and reaching for a carton of milk when the crash occurred. Nevertheless, no charges were filed.

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Ray Kelly says NYPD’s revamped crash investigation team will be increased by half.

At a City Council budget hearing this morning, Kelly told council members that the Accident Investigation Squad, soon to be known as the Collision Investigation Squad, will add 10 officers. The unit currently has a staff of 19 investigators.

According to the guidelines announced by Kelly last week, crash investigators will in the future be “notified to respond” to crashes involving critical injury. While it seems more crashes will be investigated once the department abandons the “dead or likely to die” rule, the new protocol will apparently continue to exclude many collisions, despite state law that requires a full-scale inquiry into all crashes that result in serious injury. Serious injuries are defined by the state Department of Motor Vehicles as a broken bone or worse.

As we reported yesterday, there were 2,942 serious injury crashes involving pedestrians, cyclists, and motorists in 2011. There were 250 fatal crashes. Not that crashes occur at regular intervals, but that’s an average of just under nine per day.

In the days since Kelly’s March 4 letter to the City Council outlining the new policies, at least four pedestrians and cyclists have been killed by motorists who remained at the scene. Among the victims are a senior killed last night in the Bronx, and 16-year-old Drudak Tenzin, struck Monday morning by a driver who police say was speeding and distracted. No charges have been announced in that case, or any of the other three.

NYPD has not filed charges against the driver who careened onto the sidewalk in Long Island City, killing 16-year-old Drudak Tenzin and injuring four others. Photo: WPIX

The New York City Police Department has begun dispatching crash investigators to sites of critical-injury traffic crashes as well as fatalities, the New York Times reported Sunday. And in what the paper called “a symbolic semantic change,” the department is retiring the term “accident”; henceforth, traffic crashes will be called “collisions,” and the Accident Investigation Squad will be renamed the Collision Investigation Squad.

The Times story is pegged to a pledge by Police Commissioner Ray Kelly to add personnel to the CIS, communicated in a March 4 letter to City Council Transportation Committee Chair James Vacca. “Kelly’s letter followed hearings last year,” the paper noted, “in which City Council members were critical of the department’s response to crashes” — hearings that were spurred by advocates’ outrage over police whitewashing of 2011 crashes that killed cyclist Mathieu Lefevre and pedestrian Clara Heyworth, both in Brooklyn. The Times called Kelly’s announcement a “marked shift of protocol.” What is less certain is whether the reported changes to investigation procedures will put a real dent in rampant NYC street danger.

Beefing up the squad and expanding NYPD crash reconstruction efforts is both welcome and overdue. In recent years, even fatalities such as those of Lefevre and Heyworth have been poorly analyzed or not analyzed at all, likely because the tiny (21-person) Accident Investigation Squad was charged with investigating all 250 crash deaths per year. In Lefevre’s case, investigators failed to document a broken helmet or obtain video footage from security cameras. In Heyworth’s case, an officer at the scene pronounced her unlikely to die. Kelly’s implication that the CIS will soon be staffed to investigate more than a portion of the 3,000 serious-injury crashes in NYC each year seems dubious at best; and NYPD officers will still determine if victims meet the criteria of severely injured.

But even a fully staffed CIS is only a start. What’s really needed is full disclosure of the reports themselves. Indeed, we believe that a key to creating safer streets is releasing all CIS reports — with their meticulous diagrams of crash position vis-à-vis intersections and crosswalks, descriptions of pre-crash actions and movement by participants, and, perhaps most critically, inferred vehicle speed upon braking and upon impact.

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NYPD will increase the number of officers assigned to investigate serious traffic crashes, and will revise protocols that denied the possibility of justice to thousands of victims of vehicular violence, according to a letter from Commissioner Ray Kelly to the City Council. In another major shift, the department will stop using the word “accident” to describe traffic crashes, and the Accident Investigation Squad will soon be known as the Collision Investigation Squad.

Under long-standing NYPD procedures, drivers who injured pedestrians and cyclists, and who were sober and remained at the scene, were not investigated unless the victim died or was believed likely to die. This policy undermined or destroyed investigations into an untold number of crashes, including those that took the lives of Stefanos Tsigrimanis and Clara Heyworth. The new standards described by Kelly represent a significant step forward for the department’s crash response protocol, and should result in more investigations. However, they will apparently fall short of what is required by state law.

The number of crash investigators — currently 19 — will be increased, according to Kelly. The size of the increase is not known, but the Times reported Sunday that NYPD has for months assigned investigators to “dozens” of crashes that would not have warranted investigation under the “dead or likely to die” rule. The Times says “many” of those crashes have resulted in criminal charges.

Those charges could include reckless endangerment or third degree assault, says attorney Steve Vaccaro. Reckless endangerment requires proof that a driver was aware of a risk of seriously injuring someone else, Vaccaro says. “Third degree assault requires a lower level of culpable mental state. It requires that the driver not be aware of the risk, and the failure to perceive the risk was a gross deviation of what a reasonable person would have perceived.”

“I would think that third degree assault would be a major source of these criminal prosecutions, to the extent it’s true that NYPD is investigating cases outside of the dead or likely to die rule subset,” says Vaccaro.

According to Kelly’s letter, dated March 4, crash investigators will be “notified to respond when there has been a critical injury or when a Police Department duty captain believes the extent of injuries and/or unique circumstances of a collision warrant such action.” Critical injury status will be determined by utilizing existing FDNY EMS guidelines, defined “as a patient either receiving CPR, in respiratory arrest, or requiring and receiving life sustaining ventilator/circulatory support.” Changes in the NYPD Patrol Guide will provide officers with “additional guidance” when determining whether crash investigators should be notified, and will require patrol personnel to confer with EMS at the scene.

In cases that do not result in criminal prosecution, a summons for failure to exercise due care, or merely the gathering of evidence — functions limited to AIS — will be of great help to victims. But many crashes may still fall through the cracks.

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It’s been a week since truck driver Robert Carroll ran over and killed Amar Diarrassouba at First Avenue and 117th Street in East Harlem, and although NYPD says its crash investigation is complete, the department has so far failed to address major questions about the legality of the truck Carroll was driving.

The company Carroll works for, McLane Trucking, may have sent a vehicle onto city streets that isn’t allowed anywhere in the city. The truck appears to be long enough to require an oversize permit to operate in NYC, but police have not said whether the vehicle was permitted. Carroll received only two summonses: failure to yield and failure to exercise due care.

NYPD says its investigation is complete, but there are many unanswered questions about the crash that killed Amar Diarrassouba last week. Photo: 1010 WINS via Gothamist

The day after Scott Stringer demanded action from NYC DOT while letting NYPD and District Attorney Cy Vance off the hook, Council Member Melissa Mark-Viverito sent letters to both DOT [PDF] and NYPD [PDF].

“It is my understanding that a truck this size is not even permitted to drive on our city’s local truck routes, much less a non-designated street like East 117th Street,” Mark-Viverito wrote to Police Commissioner Ray Kelly. In the letter, she requested information about how crossing guards are assigned and enforcement data on truck driver behavior.

This morning Streetsblog sent inquiries to NYPD and DOT as to whether the vehicle has an oversize permit, and we have yet to receive replies. NYPD has also not responded to Streetsblog’s query about whether Carroll had NYC truck route maps in the cab and whether he was legally traveling on a non-designated route. (According to DOT’s website: “Trucks should only use non-designated routes when traveling between their origin/destination and a truck route.”)

Only very broad information about truck route enforcement is publicly available. Citywide, NYPD issued 6,458 tickets to drivers for truck route violations in 2012. (For comparison, police issued 95,866 tickets for tinted windows.) The 25th precinct, covering the area of East Harlem where Diarrassouba died, made truck route enforcement a bigger relative priority than the rest of the NYPD last year, issuing 275 truck route tickets.

Another enforcement issue raised by Diarrassouba’s death is the safety mirror loophole. The state law requiring crossover mirrors on large trucks, which allow drivers to see the blind spot in front of the cab, exempts vehicles registered out-of-state. McLane Trucking, the owner of the truck that crushed Diarrassouba, is based in Texas. NYPD and McLane have not responded to inquiries as to whether the truck is registered in New York.

NYPD said on Monday that its investigation is complete. But with all the unanswered questions about this case, the public is barely any wiser about what contributed to the death of Amar Diarrassouba and how future tragedies can be prevented.

NYPD and Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance are reportedly targeting a crossing guard for her supposed role in the death of 6-year-old Amar Diarrassouba, who was killed by a truck driver in East Harlem Thursday morning. Meanwhile, a local businessman and community board member who waged a campaign against pedestrian refuges and protected bike lanes on First and Second Avenues has publicly pinned the blame on the victim’s 9-year-old brother.

Amar Diarrassouba

Robert Carroll was issued summonses for failure to yield and failure to exercise due care, according to the Post. Reports say Carroll was turning right from E. 117th Street onto First Avenue when he hit Amar with a rear tire of the tractor-trailer. Amar and older brother Youssouf were crossing First Avenue east to west, on their way to nearby P.S. 155.

Community Board 11 endorsed protected bike lanes and pedestrian refuges on First and Second Avenues from 96th to 125th Streets in September 2011, but rescinded its support two months later, when restaurant owners Frank Brija and Erik Mayor, who are also on the board, organized against the project.

Brija and Mayor, owners of Patsy’s Pizza and Milk Burger, respectively, said businesses were not contacted about the proposal for protected lanes and pedestrian islands, a claim refuted by DOT. They also said the safety measures would make traffic congestion worse and increase asthma rates.

The board ultimately endorsed the plan, which had broad community support, a second time, in March 2012. Construction was supposed to begin last spring, but was pushed back after the board waffled. While it’s impossible to know how the First Avenue redesign would have affected this crash, a narrower roadway may have saved Amar’s life by forcing Carroll to make a tighter, slower turn.

On Streetsblog and Twitter this morning, attorney Steve Vaccaro noted that, had the project proceeded as planned, the crash that killed Amar Diarrassouba might not have happened. In response, Mayor tweeted: “Steve you are pathetic to place blame on us. The child was being walked by his nine year old brother who did not pay attention.”

Erik Mayor, owner of Milk Burger and member of CB 11, waged a campaign against safety measures for the intersection where Amar was killed.

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A 7-year-old boy was killed by a truck driver this morning while walking to school in East Harlem. While no charges were filed against the driver, police and media are focused on the actions of a crossing guard, who was reportedly on a break when the crash occurred.

Trucks over 55 feet are not allowed on NYC surface streets without a permit. According to reports, the truck driver who killed Amar Diarrassouba was driving on a street that is not a designated truck route. He was not charged. Photo: 1010 WINS via Gothamist

Amar Diarrassouba and his 10-year-old brother were crossing First Avenue at E. 117th Street, east to west, when, according to reports, the westbound driver of a tractor-trailer ran over the younger boy while turning right from 117th to First. The driver was stopped by witnesses some distance away. The Post writes:

“It was crazy. I saw a man chasing the truck on 119th Street,” said neighborhood resident Vinny Brasero, 49.

“I saw the boy, there was just so much blood, I knew he wasn’t going to make it. I couldn’t even get too close because when I saw he wasn’t moving and all that blood, it didn’t look good.”

The victim’s big brother was “hysterical, crying” at the scene, according to Brasero.

“I was crying a little bit because I have kids,” he added.

East 117th Street is a narrow, one-way street. It is not a truck route. Trucks exceeding 55 feet in length, like the one involved in this crash, are not allowed on surface streets without a permit. McClane trucking, which apparently owns the truck, is based in Texas. Trucks registered outside New York are exempt from the state’s crossover mirror requirement. It appears from a Post photo that the truck is not equipped with the mirrors, which allow truck drivers to see what is directly in front of them.

Of all the factors that contributed to this fatality — massive trucks allowed on city streets, a loophole in a state law, the truck driver’s failure to yield to two kids while driving on a neighborhood street not designated for trucks — reports say authorities are investigating why a crossing guard stationed at the intersection was not present at the time of the crash. Naturally, this is the detail the city press corps has zeroed in on.

While NYPD focused on the crossing guard, police defended the driver. From DNAinfo:

“Tractor trailers often have to make very wide turns,” said a police spokesman at the scene. “It’s possible, given the height of the vehicle and the kind of turn he had to make, that he just didn’t see the kid.”

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Emergency responders work to free Amy Fass from beneath a cab, after she was struck at W. 181st Street and Haven Avenue. The driver was not charged. Photo: Andrew Adams

A reader has identified the woman wounded by a cab driver in Upper Manhattan Sunday evening as Amy Fass of Washington Heights. The crash occurred in the 34th Precinct, where officers issued two speeding tickets in the last three months of 2012.

Fass was crossing 181st at Haven Avenue, near her home, at approximately 6:45 p.m. when she was struck as the cab driver appeared to be en route to the West Side Highway. Andrew Adams writes:

Amy, in her late 50s, was in the crosswalk when a driver of a SUV taxi struck her and drug her approximately 40 feet before he stopped when pedestrians screamed at him to do so. She was pinned underneath the taxi until emergency services responded to rescue her.

Another witness posted this account on a neighborhood parent list:

I saw when she was trapped under the taxi on Haven Ave. where it leads to the West Side Highway. The cab must have been speeding downhill on 181st. She lives on Haven in the building next to the highway entrance. My impression was that she was very badly hurt.

A third witness, James Ribas, told the Post: ”I saw a cabby going real fast. He didn’t know he hit her.”

Fass was conscious at the scene, but at some point went into cardiac and respiratory arrest, according to an FDNY spokesperson. She was considered “not likely” to die when transported to Lincoln Hospital.

Adams heard from a family member today that Fass remains hospitalized. Her release date is uncertain, but she will require physical rehabilitation, the family member said.

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