Nine People Were Killed By Hit-And-Run Drivers In August
A hit-and-run driver struck a nurse on Saturday morning on a notoriously dangerous roadway in Sunset Park — marking the ninth time this month that a driver killed a New Yorker and fled.
The latest victim, Jiayi Zheng, a 28-year-old nurse at NYU Langone Hospital-Brooklyn, was struck by the driver of a 2014 Cadillac sedan on Third Avenue and 55th Street, just a few blocks from the medical center where she worked — grimly, the same facility to which EMTs transported her and where she died.
The week before Zheng’s death, hit-and-run drivers killed three cyclists. Days later, another hit-and-run driver struck and killed a 22-year-old in a crosswalk in the West Village, leading street safety advocates to call for a “die-in” outside City Hall to demand that Mayor Mamdani “stop the carnage.”
Zheng was hit while she crossed Third Avenue under the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway — part of a deadly two-mile stretch under the BQE where drivers have killed 11 pedestrians and cyclists since 2014, according to Transportation Alternatives.
Ben Furnas, the organization’s executive director, noted in a statement that Zheng’s death was “not inevitable”: In 2023, the Department of Transportation proposed reducing traffic to two moving lanes after locals called for “dramatic” changes to protect pedestrians and cyclists on the dangerous street. But the DOT under then-Mayor Eric Adams canceled it “due to concerns raised by business groups,” as Streetsblog reported at the time.
Within a year, a speeding driver blew through a red light and killed two men crossing the street. Experts said that the redesign paused by Adams would have prevented the deaths, since DOT stats show protected bike lanes and road diets lead to reductions in traffic crashes.
Mayor Mamdani seems to be reconsidering the redesigns proposed in 2024. Just days before Zheng was killed, the Mamdani administration announced a BQE renovation plan that included “a traffic safety redesign of Third Avenue in Sunset Park” — though the city doesn’t plan to implement until 2030.
“The Mamdani Administration is committed to advancing a redesign of Brooklyn’s Third Avenue that will reflect the needs of the community and enhance safety for all road users,” DOT spokesperson Will Livingston said last week, before the latest death.
NYPD data show that hit-and-runs are rarely solved: out of the 34,952 cases where a driver left the scene of a collision resulting in property damage or personal injury in 2025, only 362 — or just 1 percent — led to an arrest. The vast majority are property damage.
The department reported 16 hit-and-runs that resulted in critical injury in the first quarter of 2026, the most recent period for which data is available. Five arrests were made.
A 2019 Streetsblog investigation into hit-and-run incidents found that strict state laws, flawed and rushed NYPD investigations by an understaffed unit and a general lax attitude around vehicular crimes contributes to the chronic under-prosecution of these crimes. Out of 5,699 hit-and-run crashes involving serious or non-serious injury that year, only 492 people were arrested — a rate of less than 9 percent.
Some drivers are able to avoid charges by claiming that they “didn’t know” they hit someone — a claim that often leads the NYPD to let a driver off the hook even though experts say that such a claim is actually an admission of guilt.
At a press conference on Monday, Mayor Mamdani was asked about the many hit-and-runs this month.
“We have seen tragic hit-and-runs across the city over the past seven days, and they underscore the importance of Vision Zero,” Hizzoner said.
But advocates remain frustrated.
“New York City streets should be the envy of the world, but we are the envy of no one today,” Furnas wrote.
A spokesperson for the NYPD said the agency was “trying to [provide] additional updated data.” We will update this story if needed.
