A 13-year-old girl died from injuries sustained when an SUV driver struck her at a busy uptown intersection as she made final preparations for her 14th birthday party.
High school freshman Niyell McCrorey died on Friday, eight days after a driver ran into her at W. 110th Street and Manhattan Avenue, according to the Police Department.
The collision happened around 1:50 p.m. when the motorist was heading southbound on Manhattan Avenue and struck Niyell, who was crossing the street from east to west.
The driver remained on the scene and was not arrested, while Niyell was taken to a nearby hospital, never to see the outside world again.
The teen had been on her way to catch a bus to visit her cousin and get her hair done for her 14th birthday just 17 days away, according to her dad, who spoke to Streetsblog at a vigil on Monday.
"She never made it," Darnell McCrow told Streetsblog. "The driver is still free, my daughter is dead."
The child lay on the ground for 13 minutes before paramedics arrived, according to McCrow, and she was in the hospital for just over a week in critical condition. He poured his heart out on Instagram, posting baby pictures of his daughter:
Niyell's family and loved ones gathered at the corner where she was hit, and they reminisced about her love of dancing, playing the trumpet, and helping out her friends.
"Oh my God, she hears music anywhere, she just starts dancing — and he took that from her," said her grand-aunt, Victoria Holley.
"That was my best friend," added Niyell's grandmother, Alitha Mackins. "I love my grand-daughter more than my first breath, that’s how much I love her."
The intersection is wide with two-way traffic on both streets, and left-turning drivers often blocked the view of pedestrians crossing at the intersections. Cars park right up against the corner because there is no restriction on vehicle storage there to clear sight lines, a design known as daylighting.
The youngster's death adds to a horrible tally of traffic violence on the city's streets. She is the 15th child killed by drivers so far this year, the second-highest rate at this point in the year since former Mayor Bill de Blasio launched Vision Zero in 2014, according to advocates with Transportation Alternatives.
"Absolutely no one should fear death or serious injury just walking around the city they call home, and New York can do so much more to keep our youngest and most vulnerable pedestrians safe," said Philip Miatkowski, Transportation Alternatives's senior director of Research and Policy. "This intersection was designed to be dangerous, and it's time for the city to prioritize New Yorkers instead of falling even further behind on the daylighting promises it made when another child was killed only a year ago."
A whopping 217 people have been killed in crashes this year so far — a rate of nearly five deaths a week — and at least 97 pedestrians have been killed, up from 81 over the same period last year. Over the past weekend alone, four New Yorkers died, and another four were critically injured, according to the advocacy group.
Those include:
- A cyclist killed in Harlem by a hit-and-run van driver trying to evade a police traffic stop
- A 66-year-old killed by another driver who fled the scene in Harlem
- Another 66-year-old killed by an SUV driver in Canarsie while crossing the street
- A motorcyclist fatally struck by a driver in Maspeth
- A pedestrian critically injured in Astoria by a hit-and-run driver
- Two cyclists struck by a driver who fell asleep at the wheel in Clinton Hill
- A driver critically injured in a single-vehicle crash in Coney Island
- An e-scooter rider critically injured in a single-vehicle crash in Central Park.
