For the first time in NYC history, a street has been named for a traffic agent. Exactly three years after Donnette Sanz was killed in a tragic accident, family, friends, and NYPD officers gathered at the intersection of East 188th Street and Webster Avenue in the Bronx, which has been renamed Donnette and Sean Sanz Place. Sanz was seven months pregnant at the time of the accident, and her premature son Sean died a week later.
Sanz, 33, was hit by 72-year-old Walter Walker during her lunch break on August 15th, 2008. Walker, who reportedly had a long history of license suspensions, knocked her into the path of an oncoming school bus. Good Samaritans ran to her aid and lifted up the bus to pull her out, but she died hours later. In the end, Walker served just six months in jail on a criminally negligent homicide rap.
At yesterday's ceremony, NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly described Sanz as an "exceptional human being." She had given her husband Rafael Sanz a kidney four years before her death, and yesterday the widowed husband told those assembled, "My loss was great." But the Daily News reports that the most heartbreaking remarks came from Sanz's niece Nordia McLean, who said Sanz "was my best friend. There are times I miss her so much. She said, 'I want you to be something in life.' "
