The driver who struck and killed 3-year-old Allison Liao in 2013 as she crossed a Queens street with her grandmother will lose his license for five years, thanks to a civil settlement reached with the family this week.
Earlier this year, Ahmad Abu-Zayedeh had his license revoked for a mere 30 days following the horrifying October 6th, 2013 collision, in which Abu-Zayedeh fatally struck both Allison, who was holding her grandmother's hand, and injured her grandmother as they crossed Main Street in Flushing. While the tragedy was caught on (very graphic) video, Abu-Zayedeh was never criminally charged, and the DMV initially took 47 seconds at a hearing to void his tickets for failing to exercise due care and failing to yield to a pedestrian.
Thanks to civil litigation, however, Abu-Zayedeh will neither drive nor apply for a license for at least the next five years. "If he does do either of those things, under the agreement an arbitrator would have no discretion but to award $100K in damages against the driver for doing so," the Liao family's attorney, Steve Vaccaro, told us. Abu-Zayedeh has also agreed to pay a substantial financial settlement—one that requires him to take out a second mortgage on his home—and has admitted publicly that he was responsible for Allison's death, writing in a letter to the family, "I was not looking where I should have been when I turned my car, and that is the sole reason why she is dead."
"It was reported, and the story is still out in the Daily News, that Allison broke free from her grandmother in the street and ran under [Abu-Zayedeh's] car," Vaccaro told us. "The impact of that false report has been absolutely devastating on the Liao family and in particular on Chin Hua Liao, Allison's grandmother, who was publicly blamed in the English language and Chinese language press for the death of her granddaughter without any basis."
Vaccaro noted that the settlement is unusual in its severity considering what few, if any, consequences drivers who kill pedestrians and cyclists face in New York. "In other parts of the world, the penalties for reckless driving are tailored to the resources and means of the violator and so there can be penalties of thousands of dollars for reckless driving; I think that's appropriate here and in other cases like this," he said. "It's also true in other places that killing someone with a car will result in a permanent or at least long term revocation of a license and that's what's happening here."
The settlement, he added, offers some small closure to a family who will still never get to see their daughter grow up. "They feel like they're getting the justice that Ally deserves," he said.
