Police arrested a motorist they say struck and killed two pedestrians in Brooklyn before fleeing the scene early Friday morning on Third Avenue below the Gowanus Expressway in Sunset Park – a dangerous roadway where Mayor Adams has refused to advance safety upgrades amid opposition from the business community.
The driver, 23-year-old Juventino Anastacio Florentino, of Staten Island, was heading south at high speed when he fatally hit the two men, Sunset Park resident Kex Un Chen, 80, and 59-year-old Faqui Lin from Bensonhurst, at 52nd Street around 4:22 a.m., according to an NYPD spokesman.
Cops arrested the motorist around just before 11:30 a.m. on the Rock, and charged him with two counts of manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide, along with leaving the scene, disregarding a steady red light and speeding, the rep said.
Chen and Lin were walking in the crosswalk against the light initially, but it changed to green as they reached the middle of the street, according to surveillance footage obtained by the Daily News.
The motorist was going a staggering 70 miles per hour, a witness told the paper.
Footage from the crash site by ABC 7 NY's Eyewitness News shows the debris from the high-speed crash, including what appear to be the men's shoes and shopping carts.
The horrific double-killing happened on a roadway that the city has long known to be deadly and promised to make safer. Yet city officials delayed plans for a safety overhaul multiple times in recent years — before Mayor Adams himself intervened in March on behalf of local business and put the project on hold until at least the end of this year.
Since Adams's intervention, there have been 96 reported crashes along the corridor, injuring 80 people – more than four per week – including five people on bikes and three pedestrians.
Since 2018, 80 people have been killed or seriously injured along just a two-mile stretch of Third Avenue, according to the advocacy group Transportation Alternatives.
"These two deaths are as horrifying as they were preventable, and it’s especially gutting when two New Yorkers are killed on a street that the community and City Hall both know is dangerous," said the organization's Executive Director Ben Furnas in a statement.
The Department of Transportation's redesign proposal consisted of a "road diet" that would have cut the number of car lanes down from three in each direction to two and install a curbside parking-protected bike lane and painted pedestrian islands to improve safety for people on the corridor who aren't in cars.
Local Community Board 7 endorsed the road diet in early 2024 nearly unanimously, but Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce CEO Randy Peers showed up to the community board's next monthly meeting to dress down the civic volunteers, accusing them of choosing the "most disruptive and radical option" without consulting local businesses enough.
Adams within months paused the proposal, with DOT reps telling CB 7 not to expect any work in 2025.
Local advocates and civic leaders had warned that holding off on the vital redesign would have lethal consequences, given the streets wide design that encourages reckless driving.
"It was only a matter of time before somebody else died on this corridor and here we are," CB 7's Chairperson Julio Peña told Streetsblog. "Every death is preventable, and once again we are in a place of frustration where we have this incredibly dangerous corridor and the city just refusing to make it safer for pedestrians, cyclists, drivers."
Road diets reduce the rates of people killed or seriously injured in crashes by 30 percent on average, according to an agency evaluation over 13 years. On Fourth Avenue a block over, pedestrian injuries have declined by 29 percent since DOT installed a similar road narrowing in 2012.
The saga is one of many instances where City Hall deferred to special interests over street safety for everyday New Yorkers, most recently the 34th Street busway in Manhattan, a bike boulevard on Underhill Avenue, an offset bus lane on Fordham Road, a protected bike lane on McGuinness Boulevard and a protected bike lane on Ashland Place.
The inaction stands in stark contrast to Hizzoner's light-speed maneuvers to rip out the protected bike lane on Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg, following non-fatal e-bike collisions.
"From Sunset Park to Bedford Avenue, the Adams administration is ignoring their own data and settled research to halt — and even rip up — safety improvements," Furnas said. "It is a level of antagonism toward people walking and biking that will only lead to more death, more injury, and more cost to taxpayers."
A City Hall spokesperson said they are "reviewing the details" of the collision. .
"Our hearts go out to the loved ones of the victims of this tragic and devastating incident. We are reviewing the details of the crash," said Sophia Askari in a statement.
