Pedestrian Killed By Hit-and-Run School Bus Driver in the Bronx
A Bronx woman was fatally struck by a school bus driver, who fled the crash site in the Castle Hill section before cops arrived, police said.
According to preliminary reports, the 68-year-old woman, whose name was not immediately released, was crossing Havemeyer Street on Story Avenue at around 9:48 a.m. when she was hit by the driver as he or she headed south on two-way Havemeyer. The intersection has stop signs in all vehicular directions.
A video posted by the New York Post shows the bus driver had stopped at the intersection, but too close to the crosswalk. The driver waited for a truck to pass through the intersection on Story Avenue before he or she started moving. By then, the pedestrian, who had been crossing in the opposite direction of car traffic, was directly in front of the bus. It is unclear if the driver saw her, but he ran over her and did not stop.
The woman was taken to Jacobi Hospital, where she died. The driver fled and remains at large, cops said.
Police could not say if the school bus was serving a public or private school. The crash site is three blocks from PS 138 and near several Catholic and charter schools.
Since January 2015, there have been 13 crashes on the five blocks of Havemeyer south of the Bruckner Expressway resulting in 17 injuries, all but one of them to drivers.
Thursday’s death is likely to draw renewed attention to the NYPD’s poor performance in catching hit-and-run drivers of late. There are now five road deaths that remain unsolved by cops since late last year.
Activists are not impressed.
“NYPD has a tremendous responsibility to thoroughly and quickly seek justice when the egregious act of leaving a victim behind is committed,” said Marco Conner, interim co-director of Transportation Alternatives. “Time and again we see traffic violence being treated by the NYPD as a lesser form of violence simply because the inadvertent weapon is not a knife or a gun. This has to change. Police in NYC can play a key role in changing the culture of reckless driving, and they need to start treating traffic violence as the violence that it is.”
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