A Fort Greene cyclist was mangled on Friday in a brutal hit-and-run in Williamsburg — and now her friends are on the hunt for the merciless driver who left her for dead.
Serena Rio, 21, was riding near S. Fourth Street and Wythe Avenue at about 2:30 pm when a car slammed into her and fled, leaving her lying on the pavement with broken ribs, a punctured lung and missing teeth. Rio miraculously survived.
“I’ve never seen anybody this demolished on a bike,” Rio’s friend, Addison Blakemore, said on Monday. “These hit-and-runs happen all the time. We just want to find anyone who saw something that day.”
Rio was unconscious for most of the weekend, but her friends say that she’s now moving and talking at Bellevue Hospital.
Sadly, Blakemore was right to say that driver and cyclist collisions happen all the time. Several cyclists were injured by cars over the weekend, one of whom is clinging to life after a collision on Eighth Avenue in Manhattan.
In Brooklyn, a handful of cyclists have been killed over the past year — two were killed on one day in April — in a series of hit-and-run collisions.
Meanwhile, cops continue to fine cyclists in a ticketing blitz to enforce bike laws — yet most of the cases of biker deaths in Brooklyn in the last year have been the driver’s fault.
If anyone has any information regarding Rio’s accident, contact Blakemore at agblakemore@gmail.com.
