A 44-year-old cyclist was badly injured by a driver who hopped into a car to get away from police in the West Village on Wednesday afternoon — and authorities refused to comment on allegations that the crash was the result of another police chase.
What is known is that police approached a suspect near the corner of W. Third Street and Mercer Street at around 3 p.m. for reasons that a police spokesperson declined to provide.
The suspect "jumped into a vehicle," the spokesperson said, and drove it the wrong way down W. Third Street, striking the cyclist before fleeing.
The driver remains at large. The cyclist was taken to Bellevue Hospital in stable condition, the spokesperson said.
The officer in the NYPD's public information office declined to discuss why several outlets, including FreedomNewsTV and Citizen, reported that the driver was fleeing a police chase in a Ford Fusion. After the crash, according to Citizen, the police chase was "called off."
Citizen also reported that the unoccupied Ford Fusion was later found near Prince Street in SoHo.
It's the latest example of a crash stemming from a flight from police, a sequence of events that are on the rise since the beginning of the Adams administration, as Streetsblog and The City have reported.
The Sixth Precinct (just under the gray box on Manhattan's bottom western corner) has not been a hotbed of pursuits, according to city records:
This is a breaking story and we hope to update.
