Cop Left Pedestrian To Die After Hit-and-Run — And Told His Pals To Lie About It: DA

An off-duty cop who critically injured a Queens pedestrian before fleeing the scene and then getting his friends to lie about the incident is now facing seven years in the slammer for the assault, reckless driving and tampering with evidence, prosecutors charged this week.

According to Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz, the officer, Jatinderpal Singh, had been repeatedly driving recklessly on that March night, including speeding and ignoring stop signals. But after striking the 22-year-old pedestrian at Rockaway Boulevard and 122nd Place, Singh fled without rendering aid, did not report the crash to his NYPD supervisors and, instead, told his friends to lie about the incident by deleting evidence from their phones and take the black Cadillac Escalade to be repaired at a shop on Long Island, Katz said.

Meanwhile, the victim, whose name has not been released, ended up having her spleen removed and metal rods placed in her legs in the life-altering crash.

“This defendant was sworn to uphold the law and instead showed complete disregard for the rules of the road as he sped through the streets of Queens,” Katz said in a statement.

Singh is no longer a cop; he resigned in May after two undistinguished years, one at the 25th Precinct in East Harlem and another at the NYPD’s Brooklyn Court Section, according to city records.

Singh’s arrest is rare among hit-and-run drivers: As Streetsblog recently reported, there were 34,592 hit-and-run crashes involving injury or property damage in 2025, but only 1 percent of those drivers was ever charged, according to NYPD data.

The NYPD has a higher closure rate for hit and runs that cause critical injuries. There were 16 such crashes in the first three months of 2026, leading to five arrests.

It’s no wonder that very, very few of the around 8,000 hit-and-runs involving some degree of personal injury in 2025, according to an analysis of NYPD data by Streetsblog, resulted in an arrest. Data obtained by Streetsblog show that there are only 53 officers in the entire NYPD’s collision investigation squad, despite years of efforts to get the NYPD to bolster that unit. As it is now, it only investigates fatal crashes — roughly 250 per year — and a tiny amount of the most-serious crashes.

Just last month, there were nine fatal hit-and-runs, prompting advocates to hold a “die-in” outside City Hall to demand that Mayor Mamdani “stop the carnage.” The mayor later said he remains committed to “the importance of Vision Zero.”