Updated | A Bronx pedestrian crossing in a marked crosswalk and with the light was run down and killed by the driver of a schoolbus on Monday — and the careless operator was later charged, police said.
According to the NYPD, the 80-year-old pedestrian — whose name was not initially released — was crossing Boston Road at around 6 p.m. when 52-year-old Rafael Ortiz hit her with his yellow Chevrolet Express school as he attempted to turn from Wilkins Avenue onto Boston Road.
The victim was taken to St. Barnabas Hospital, where she died. Ortiz was charged with failure to yield to a pedestrian, a crime punishable by days in jail, not weeks, months or years.
Boston Road in the Charlotte Garden section of the Bronx is particularly dangerous, statistics show. Since 2017, there have been 14 crashes injuring one cyclist and two pedestrians at the intersection of Wilkins Avenue and Boston Road alone. Over the same period, the three block portion of Boston Road near the crash has been the site of 69 crashes, injuring one cyclist and nine pedestrians.
In a separate incident, CBS2 reported that another pedestrian had been killed in a hit-and-run at Bruckner Boulevard and Country Club Road near the Bruckner Expressway early on Tuesday. Police later confirmed that they found the still-unidentified man lying on the service road at around 5:05 a.m.
An investigation reveled that the victim had gotten out of his vehicle and apparently tried to cross the service road, when he was struck by a driver, who kept on going in the northbound direction.
Police said the vehicle was "possibly a dump truck with a blue container."
To put all this road carnage in perspective, in just the 12 months of 2018, the Bronx had 33,306 reported crashes — the equivalent of 91 per day. Those crashes injured 434 cyclists, 1,753 pedestrians and 7,675 motorists, and killed two cyclists, 19 pedestrians and 17 motorists.
Updated at 1:10 pm on Tuesday to add the charges and more details about the Bruckner crash.
