A Car Driver Ripped Off a Woman’s Leg in Broad Daylight
A Brooklyn driver drove onto a busy sidewalk in central Williamsburg and maimed a 33-year-old pedestrian. Why can't our officials prevent this kind of predictable incident?
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The driver who sheared off Margaret Duffy's leg was speeding in his Hyundai Sonata on the sidewalk of Manhattan Avenue. In just an instant — the amount of time it takes a single impatient driver to veer onto the sidewalk and hit the gas — Duffy's life was changed forever.
It was Nov. 25, two days before Thanksgiving. Duffy, 33, was standing in a doorway on the west sidewalk holding an orange bag when the driver, identified by police as 75-year-old Brooklynite Julio Didy, conducted his mad rampage. As seen on video obtained by News12, one woman scrambles to safety between two parked cars, but Didy strikes Duffy with full force, then knocks down a metal gate, clips a mirror and bumper off a parked car, and slams into a red fire alarm call box that, fortunately for several people at the corner, arrested his movement, bringing the chaos and carnage to a close.
Security footage of the Nov. 26 crash that maimed Margaret Duffy (circled) in Williamsburg.News12
Since there was no fatality, the NYPD didn’t issue a press bulletin. News12 was the only outlet that covered the crash. The city mostly yawned, as it typically does, but car drivers injure and kill New Yorkers every single day. According to the latest stats, there have been nearly 13,251 pedestrians and cyclists injured in the 335 days between Jan. 1 and Dec. 2 2025, or roughly 40 injuries to vulnerable road users every single day. The intersection where Didy maimed Duffy has experienced 53 reported crashes, injuring 35 people, including 17 cyclists and pedestrians since 2020.
The crash
It is not fully clear, beyond a desire to get somewhere quickly, why Didy was driving on the sidewalk. The NYPD did not conduct a full probe by the Collision Investigation Squad, which is reserved solely for fatal crashes and several high-profile injury crashes per year. The NYPD did not officially respond to questions about the incident, but a department source told Streetsblog that Didy "lost control of his car" and "jump[ed] the curb."
Witnesses offered conflicting testimony. Selene De La Cruz told Streetsblog that she saw Didy swerve around a UPS in the crosswalk at Manhattan Avenue and Maujer Street, one block south of the crash site, before mounting the sidewalk on Manhattan Avenue.
Another witness, Tommy Lawrence, said he saw the Sonata rushing toward him and slam into the red call box. "The [driver] got out [and] he was lucid," he told Streetsblog. "People were screaming, 'You’re a fucking idiot! What are you doing?' He said, 'The car took off on me.'"
Whether he was an impatient driver or "lost control" of the car, Didy was driving on the sidewalk, where no driver, under state law, can drive, except under very rare circumstances, such as when construction in the road forces them into pedestrian space. Even then, drivers must stay below 5 miles per hour and yield to walkers. Enforcement of this law is obviously spotty in a very large city.
Didy’s history of speeding
But the city has ways to prevent such carnage. City speed cameras had flagged Didy's Florida-plated car exceeding the speed limit by 11 miles per hour four times since May 2025 — including just one month before the crash. Had those tickets been written by a cop, they would have put 16 points on Didy's license — enough to suspend it. (By contrast, speed- and red-light camera tickets are not counted as points on the license of the car's owner.)
But, again, in a big city, enforcement by officers is spotty.
A pending bill in Albany would close the speed-camera loophole by suspending the registration of any car that racks up at least five automated speeding tickets over an 18-month period. The bill has been introduced in every legislative session going back to 2015, but it has never even gotten out of committee in a legislature controlled by car drivers.
What else could work?
In a climate where daily vehicular violence in New York City is seen as merely unavoidable "accidents," legislators often forget that all crashes are preventable. As such, they gravitate toward penalizing drivers after they’re caught speeding. But bills to do more than penalize, but to remove the threat from the road, rarely succeed in the legislature. For instance, the popular "Stop Super Speeders" bill, which would require only frequent recidivist speeders to install a device to limit their speed to the posted limit, has failed repeatedly in Albany. Opponents say it's unfair to drivers, even the ones who get frequent tickets for speeding in school zones.
With a ban on cars a non-starter, New York City has one obvious engineering solution: bollards. Simple steel bollards on the corner of Maujer Street and Manhattan Avenue would have prevented Didy from driving onto the sidewalk in the first place.
Yet bollards remain a strikingly sore topic within the city’s Department of Transportation, and, indeed, declined to discuss its philosophy on bollards for this story. The agency knows how to install them — they protect every fire hydrant in the city, after all — and even published a "How To" guide four years ago. But it is the rare area that receives bollards. It is unclear why the agency does not expand the program.
Meanwhile, Margaret Duffy remains at Bellevue Hospital. More than 700 friends, family, neighbors and strangers have raised nearly $100,000 on GoFundMe to pay for her medical care and support her vintage-clothing store in Chinatown. The page says she has had several surgeries, but has begun physical therapy before moving to a rehabilitation program.
"I don't know what to think anymore," her distraught father, Owen, said in a brief interview. "Just concentrating on one thing now."
Nolan Hicks is a longtime reporter in New York City, who focuses on investigative stories. He spent six years at The New York Post where his stories prompted the MTA to redesign parts of the Second Avenue Subway's East Harlem extension and helped uncover the LIRR overtime scandal. As a contributor to Curbed/New York Magazine, he dove into Amtrak's failing power grid, NJ Transit's reliability crisis and why it costs the MTA $100 million to put elevators into stations. He has also worked at the New York Daily News, Austin American-Statesman and San Antonio Express-News. He joined Streetsblog in January 2025.
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