This driver is parked — in prison.
The motorist who crashed into five people crossing a Park Slope street in March, killing two kids and an unborn baby, cannot make bail and will wait out her trial in New York City’s notoriously hellish Rikers Island — where one deranged inmate already assaulted her, according to her lawyer.
Dorothy Bruns’s attorney David Jacobs claimed another prisoner with “mental problems” served his client a knuckle sandwich in a cafeteria at the city’s water-locked detention facility, arguing the altercation should justify lowering the defendant’s previously set bail from $25,000 to $6,000 cash.
But his sob story didn’t sway Supreme Court Justice Danny Chun, who, in lieu of reducing Bruns’s cash bail, ordered she be kept in protective custody, where she’ll be segregated from the prison’s general population for her safety.
Bruns is struggling to make bail because she can’t collect an income behind bars, according to her lawyer, who said her nephew is helping with the cause, but has so far failed to raise enough collateral for the $75,000 bond Chun imposed in order to release her from the island hellhole.
That means she’ll likely have to wait out her trial — for which Jacobs said a date has yet to be set — at the brutal detention center, which a 2013 investigation named as one of the country’s worst prisons, and Mayor DeBlasio is pushing to close within the next decade.
“We’re far from a trial,” Jacobs said.
Last month, prosecutors charged Bruns with reckless manslaughter for hitting and killing the youngsters, claiming she got behind the wheel against the orders of her doctor, who told the seizure-prone driver to stay off the road due to her history of epileptic fits — one of which allegedly caused her to lose control of her vehicle and smash into the children, their mothers, and another man crossing Ninth Street at Fifth Avenue on March 5.
Bruns faces up to 15 years in prison if convicted.
