A motorist struck and killed a 52-year-old man who was fixing a flat tire on his vehicle on the shoulder of the Long Island Expressway in Queens early Monday morning, police said.
The driver of a Tesla hit Jean Louis of Cambria Heights as he worked on the disabled vehicle shortly after midnight next to the LIE's westbound lane near Horace Harding Expressway and Main Street in Flushing in the 109th Precinct, according to the cops.
Louis was found with severe body trauma and was transported to New York-Presbyterian Hospital-Queens, where he died.
The Tesla driver, who the police did not identify, remained on the scene, and the investigation is ongoing.
The 109th Precinct is a notorious car sewer crisscrossed with dangerous roads. Just in the last two years (June 2019 to June 2021), it has seen 14 traffic fatalities, including 7 pedestrians, 5 motorists and 2 cyclists, and 2013 traffic injuries, from 7,109 crashes, or about 10 crashes a day, according to crashmapper.org.
Traffic violence is turning 2021 into an exceptionally bloody year — the deadliest for such fatalities since Mayor de Blasio took office. According to the Department of Transportation, as of July 25, at least 142 people have died because of motorists on city streets so far this year. It’s the most year-to-date fatalities since 2013 — before de Blasio started the Vision Zero program aimed at eliminating road deaths, as some cities have around the globe.
