A motorcycle rider was killed by an ambulance driver in Downtown Brooklyn on a snow-narrowed roadway on Sunday — the first such fatality this year, police said.
According to the NYPD, at around 1:10 a.m., the rider of a Fly E-Bike vehicle was headed southbound on Ashland Place when he was struck by the 21-year-old driver of an ambulance that was turning onto Willoughby Street near Brooklyn Hospital. Police said Ray Wilkerson-Lynwood, 65, crossed over the double-yellow line in the center of the roadway, but did not provide a motivation.
Wilkerson-Lynwood, of the nearby Farragut Houses, suffered severe head trauma. He died later at Methodist Hospital, police said.
The driver of the ambulance — plus two other EMTs in the bus — were also lightly injured and taken to Brooklyn Hospital. Police said the EMTs were "canvassing for a male in distress," which, given the cold, could describe many people.
Police initially said Wilkerson-Lynwood was riding an "e-bike," but a Sanitation Department supervisor told Streetsblog, "It was definitely a motorcycle, not a bike." (Update: The Department of Transportation confirmed it was a motocycle after initial publication of this story.)
That could explain why Wilkerson-Lynwood was not in the bike lane, though on Monday, hours after the snow, the bike lane was only partially navigable, with mounds of snow narrowing the safe route.
The intersection of Ashland Place and Willoughby Street in Downtown Brooklyn is a chaotic crossing where drivers, cyclists and pedestrians are always a hair's length away from disaster. There are multiple parking lots for the hospital as well as for Long Island University, and car traffic is heavy.
The northbound side of Ashland supports a two-way protected bike lane, a row of parked cars, and a lane for car travel. But at Willoughby, the northbound direction adds a turning bay that narrows the southbound lane to barely the width of a car.
Any one riding in the southbound lane on a moped — which are barred in the bike lane — is at great risk from turning cars.
In 2025, there were 11 crashes at that one intersection, injuring three cyclists, one pedestrian and six motorists, according to city stats.
