Results tagged “accident”

Bowing to pressure from families of drunk driving victims, state Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver has thrown his support behind a bill that would make it a felony to drive with a blood alcohol content of .08 while a passenger 15 years old or under is in the car. The legislation is named for 11-year-old Leandra Rosado, who recently died in a crash on the Henry Hudson Parkway while riding with her friend's allegedly drunk mother.

Around 7 a.m., a crash involving three vehicles occurred on the West Side Highway near 125th Street. According to WABC 7, "A northbound car apparently flipped over the guardrail and into the southbound lanes, landing on another vehicle." Two people were taken to the hospital.

A Staten Island teenager is in critical condition after she was run over in a chain reaction car crash in front of Tottenville High School yesterday. At around 11:30 am, a Nissan Maxima stopped to allow 17-year-old senior Janine Brawer to cross Luten Avenue. But as she crossed the street, a Saturn rear-ended the Nissan and pushed the car into the teen, pinning her beneath it. Rescue workers extracted Brawer — who suffered cardiac arrest during the collision — and transported her to Staten Island University Hospital, where she underwent surgery and remains in "grave condition," according to police.

Two city buses ran into each other at the corner of Third Avenue and East 41st Street in Midtown, injuring at nine, according to preliminary reports. The collision occurred at around 5:30 pm on an avenue serviced by the M98, M101, M102, and M103 buses.

Last Wednesday morning a 22-year-old Seth Kahn was struck and killed by a bus while crossing the street at West 53rd Street and 9th Avenue. Area residents noted that the intersection was dangerous, one being hit there just two months ago. Now the Daily News reports on the bus driver's history.

There are some more details coming out about the truck that hit a woman in a wheelchair on Bleecker and 8th yesterday. The Daily News reports that the victim was 78-year-old off-Broadway actress and playwright Shami Chaikin, who was "riding her motorized wheelchair in a Manhattan bike lane" and was hit by a city garbage truck.

The off-duty officer who fatally ran over a woman hailing a cab in Brooklyn on a rainy night in September pleaded not guilty to vehicular manslaughter, driving while intoxicated, and other charges yesterday. Officer Andrew Kelly, a seven-year veteran assigned to the 68th Precinct, was driving with another off-duty officer and three civilians when he struck Vionique Valnord, 32, around 1 a.m. on September 27th.

Just before 10 a.m. a report came over the newswire saying a female in a wheelchair was pinned under a truck. Shortly after a reader sent in these photos from the accident, which occurred on Bleecker and 8th Avenue, showing the truck was a City Parks vehicle. The vicitim was unconscious and transported to St. Vincent's Hospital, and there has been no additional word on her condition.

An out-of-service city bus hit and killed a 23-year-old who was trying to cross Ninth Avenue this morning. The victim, a Westchester resident, had been trying to dash across the avenue near the corner of West 53rd Street at 8:44 am when he was struck by a bus making a left turn, according to the Daily News.

It comes as no surprise that the off-duty NYPD detective who fatally struck an elderly pedestrian early Friday morning in the Bronx has an alcohol problem. Detective Kevin (Spike) Spellman had a blood alcohol level of 0.21 percent—more than twice the legal limit—almost six hours after the accident. Now it's being reported that this isn't the first time booze has caused problems for Spellman and others.

The off-duty NYPD detective who fatally struck an elderly pedestrian early Friday morning in the Bronx had a blood alcohol level of 0.21 percent almost six hours after the accident. Despite delaying the test for hours by refusing to cooperate without a warrant, 22-year NYPD veteran Kevin Spellman, 42, was still very intoxicated. (The legal limit is 0.08 percent.) Spellman's alcohol level was certainly much higher at the time of the crash, but because people metabolize alcohol at different rates, it's anyone's guess how wasted he was at 6:30 a.m.

Just after 9 p.m. tonight reports came over the newswire of a scaffolding accident on East 8th Street and Broadway. This is a photo of the scene, where two taxis are trapped under the scaffolding. Reportedly there were six victims being transported to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.

Two girls have died from a horrible van crash in St. Albans, Queens that occurred at 5 p.m. yesterday. Both were foster children: The first, a 15-year-old, died late Monday night, and the other, a 5-year-old died at 4:30 this morning. The Daily News reports that driver Shelia Bethea, 45, "crossed the double-yellow line on Dunkirk St. in Saint Albans while going between 60 and 70 miles an hour, slamming her minivan into another van."

NotifyNYC just sent a notice: "Emergency personnel are on the scene of a motor vehicle accident on the eastbound Brooklyn Queens Expressway near Cadman Plaza in Brooklyn. Queens bound traffic is being diverted at Atlantic Avenue." All eastbound lanes are closed and we hear that the accident involved a school bus, taxi, and two tractor trailers.

An East Village resident sent us these photos of the aftermath of a horrific automobile crash that happened early this morning, at First Avenue and Fourth Street. An NYPD spokesman tells us that according to a "preliminary report," a 55-year-old black female was killed after a delivery van and minivan collided. Apparently, the minivan was so totaled that EMS had to cut the top off to get inside. The spokesman said there were no other injuries (which seems hard to believe) and no one was charged (which seems typical). Streetsblog hears an "unconfirmed" report that "this was a T-bone collision in which the minivan ran the light."

A Staten Island man died early Sunday morning while trying to back his SUV out of a tight parking space in a pub parking lot. Oleg Kantarovich had gone outside to pull the car around for his wife, who was celebrating her 30th birthday, so that she wouldn't get caught in the rain. Police say he was leaning out of the front door of his 2007 Audi SUV as he backed up because it may have been difficult to see through the tinted side window.

You know the NY Post was just waiting for a jaywalker to be struck by a vehicle so they could be all "told you so," after printing numerous anti-jaywalking editorials this week.

Bronx resident Sanija Kurtovic is eight months pregnant, and she got quite a scare the other day when her parked car was sideswiped as she was about to get out. But what's even scarier is that the vehicle that hit her was an NYPD cruiser, and the driver allegedly fled the scene. Kurtovic says that after her car was hit, she ran up to Officer Shirley Perez-Romero, who was stopped at a red light. But the cop allegedly played dumb, acting as if she didn't realize an accident had occured. Kurtovic says the officer told her she would do a U-turn and file a report, but instead Officer Perez-Romero just drove off.

A New York bus tour turned grisly yesterday morning as a Gray Line double-decker bus struck a woman outside of the United Nations. Lolaa Alrashied was crossing 42nd St and was struck by the bus and pinned underneath. She is currently listed in serious condition, with leg fractures and trauma, at Bellevue Hospital.

Yesterday just after noon we reported that a cab had collided with a horse and buggy on the Upper East Side. While we received plenty of photos and video of the aftermath, showing the wrecked car and carriage, there was no sight of the horse.

The accident occurred at the corner of Greene Avenue and Washington Avenue in Fort Greene. The rapper Common's cousin, Ajile Turner, allegedly hit cyclist Julian C. Miller with his Kawasaki, and both were pronounced DOA at Brooklyn Hospital.

     

Oh dear. Word just came in over the newswire that a horse and buggy has been struck on East 60th Street and 5th Avenue. The report says there are "2 aided at this point," and we'll update as soon as more information becomes available. Hopefully the horse is okay, but either way this will surely give animal rights activists more evidence that horses shouldn't be lugging tourists around the crowded streets of NYC.

A Queens Pathmark is being sued by a woman who ended up covered in tomato sauce. No, 55-year-old Patricia Samaroo didn't get the tomato treatment following a bad comedy routine, she simply ended up the victim of a toppled-over stack of sauce jars when a display collapsed on top of her at the Ozone Park grocery store. Samaroo says that nine months after the accident, she still has pain in her neck and uses painkillers for the incident that left her "sick, lame, sore and disabled." What drew the Long Islander to the unstable stack—famous last words: "It was on sale." Samaroo's suit claims that Pathmark was negligent for failing to determine if jars were likely to topple and fall. She tells the News, "I was in shock when it happened. All I know is that I was covered in spaghetti sauce." While there is no surveillance video of the incident, we did find a disaster from the Canadian version of after the jump that might suffice.

Yesterday afternoon, a school bus carrying 26 children and a SUV collided into each other—and then into a home's front fence—on Kingdom Avenue at Billou Street in Staten Island's Huguenot section. The Staten Island Advance reports that the Our Lady Star of the Sea School bus had been traveling on Kingdom, while witnesses say the SUV "rolled through a stop sign on Billiou Street, into the path" of the bus. "The front of the bus on the driver's side smashed into the Cadillac's passenger side. The driver's side of the SUV was wedged against a tree toppled in the crash." An 11-year-old student and the SUV's two passengers were treated for minor injuries. The homeowner who found the two vehicles in her front yard told the Post the surrounding streets are a mess, "Everybody is in such a hurry, people run through these [stop] signs all the time. Somebody’s going to get killed," while another neighbor opined, "No one can see the stop signs — or they don’t care. The Escalade blew the stop sign but I’m sure the bus was supposed to be on his block either."

After a record low number of fatalities from auto accidents in 2007, the number of deaths spiked last year to 292 pedestrians, drivers, passengers, bicyclists and motorcyclists—18 more people than in 2007. According to a report issued by the DOT, pedestrian fatalities last year jumped to 147, seven more than in 2007.

The parents of a 10-year-old Bronx boy who was killed by an allegedly speeding van while riding his bike are suing the city for $10 million for failing to install a speed bump. 10-year-old Michael Needham was riding his bike with friends outside the Allerton Library after school on June 5th, 2008 when the van struck him; he died after 19 days in a coma. The suit, filed Tuesday in Bronx Supreme Court, argues that the city should have known that drivers near the Allerton Library "regularly exceeded the speed limit, failed to obey stop signs, raced to make traffic lights and otherwise operated their vehicles in dangerous and unlawful manners."

There are conflicting reports about the cause of a taxi-on-pedestrian accident at 112th Street and Lexington Avenue in East Harlem yesterday afternoon, but this much is certain: 8-year-old Axel Pablo is dead, and the driver of the cab, Akim Saiful Alam, was released without charges. Witnesses and police tell the Daily News that Alam, turning left from Lex onto 112th, slammed into Pablo as he stopped to pick up his mother's cell phone while crossing the street. The impact knocked Pablo out of his shoes.

The narcotics officer who lost his leg below the knee after getting pinned by a crashed car got a much-needed boost from a fellow NYPD amputee. Officer Eric Grimes was leading drug suspects into a police van in Brooklyn on Tuesday when two cars collided and jumped the curb, crushing his lower left leg and foot. When he awoke from surgery at Kings County Hospital later that night, a surprise visitor was waiting for him: Officer Rachid Elkadi, whose right leg was amputated below the knee in May 2006 after an off-duty motorcycle accident. Elkadi spent an hour with Grimes to show him that his amputation didn't have to be a career ender; Elkadi himself returned to work a year after his accident. Now a "field intelligence officer" in Queens, Elkadi spoke with the Daily News about his bedside visit: "[Grimes] let out a sigh of relief and said, 'You are a breath of fresh air. I needed to see you.' He asked me how my life has changed. I said, 'You are not limited to anything.'"

An unidentified NYPD narcotics officer had one of his legs amputated below the calf last night after getting pinned by a car that jumped the curb during an accident in Brooklyn. The plainclothes officer, a five and a half year NYPD veteran, was loading drug bust prisoners into a van at about 5 p.m. at the intersection of Avenue U and East 34th Street in Marine Park, when two vehicles traveling opposite directions slammed into each other and jumped the curb. The cop was rushed to Kings County Hospital and is listed in serious but stable condition. No one else was hurt in the incident, and according to 1010 WINS, neither of the drivers have been charged and police have ruled this an accident.

Miguel Colon was crossing East Gun Hill Road in Baychester with his 6-year-old son Sebastian early yesterday evening when he was fatally run down by an enraged driver with a history of drug and arson arrests. According to police, the driver of the Infiniti, Mark St. Pierre, had been arguing with his wife in the parking lot of a nearby Chuck E. Cheese and sped off furiously. Before hitting Colon, he had already slammed into two cars, and a witness tells the Post the vehicle was traveling "at least 85" when it struck Colon, who was able to push his son out of harm's way before his death. St. Pierre allegedly continued driving, hitting several more cars until his vehicle was too wrecked to continue. (The occupants of those vehicles escaped with only minor injuries.) St. Pierre then tried to stagger away, but witnesses chased him and he has soon arrested. Colon had been carrying Sebastian's bicycle when he was run over, and according to the Post, the boy was later heard saying, "I need two pieces off my bike. Can you give me two pieces for memories?"