A 49-year-old woman is in critical condition after she was hit by the driver of a large truck in Greenpoint on Wednesday night, according to the NYPD.
The victim, who was not named, was crossing Sutton Street at Nassau Avenue at about 7 p.m. on Feb. 21 when the driver, 68-year-old Stanley Manel, turned left from Nassau Avenue in his 2021 Dodge Ram pickup truck and struck her in the crosswalk.
When officers arrived on the scene, they found the victim lying in the road with head trauma, according to a police spokesperson. She was rushed to NYC Health+Hospitals/Elmhurst in critical condition.
Manel remained on the scene after the crash and was arrested and charged with failure to yield and failure to exercise due care.
The crash left Greenpointers shaken and frustrated. In a joint statement, local politicians Assembly Member Emily Gallagher, state Sen. Kristen Gonzalez, Council Member Lincoln Restler and U.S. Rep. Nydia Velázquez said Manel was speeding at the time of the crash, and made the left turn onto Sutton Street without using his blinker.
“We’re deeply saddened and outraged at the news of yet another pedestrian being struck by an unsafe driver in Greenpoint,” the pols said. “Our neighbors should be able to safely cross the street, but constituents consistently share how concerned they are about dangerous, poorly designed intersections like this one. We are holding the injured person and their family in our hearts, and hope this serves as a reminder of caution — lives are destroyed by dangerous driving, both for the victims of crashes and the perpetrators.”
According to How’sMyDrivingNY, Manel’s truck has racked up 35 tickets since 2019, including 26 school speed zone camera violations. However, Streetsblog NYC reported, Manel was never subject to any of New York’s traffic safety laws, and was able to pay the ticket fines without further repercussions.
Gallagher and state Sen. Andrew Gounardes have sponsored bills in the state legislature that would require drivers who accumulate more than six speed or red light cameras in a 12-month period to install speed control devices in their cars — bills the polls again urged their colleagues to support, along with Sammy’s Law, which would allow the city to control its own speed limits.
Locals also re-upped their calls for additional street safety infrastructure in northern Brooklyn.
Nassau Avenue, which runs east-west from northern Williamsburg near McCarren Park to Varick Street in Eastern Greenpoint, has seen at least 68 crashes resulting in 82 injuries in the last five years, according to data compiled by CrashMapper. Dozens of those crashes were caused by driver inattention or failure to yield right-of-way.
“Our streets between Meeker and McGuinness do not just incentivize cut through traffic, they encourage reckless driving,” wrote the organizers of Make McGuinness Safe, a local safe streets group, in a social media post about the crash. “It doesn’t have to be this way. Barely half of Nassau’s cross streets have crosswalks, only seven out of fourteen. The intersection where this crash took place last night lacks a stop sign of any sort of meaningful stop control.”
In their statement, local pols urged the city’s Department of Transportation to install measures like raised crosswalks and daylighting on Nassau Avenue to slow drivers and improve pedestrian visibility and safety — a sentiment echoed by Make McGuinness Safe.
“What is at stake is the ability to cross the street to [pick up] a quart of milk at the corner store and make it home alive,” the group wrote.
