Police are on the hunt for a hit-and-run driver who fled the scene of a crash that killed an elderly woman and injured two more people on the Van Wyck Expressway in Queens early Sunday morning.
The 77-year-old victim was sitting in the back of a car heading south near 116th Avenue in South Jamaica at about 3:20 a.m. on Aug. 1 when a woman in a BMW SUV rear-ended her and another vehicle, according to police.
The reckless driver careened off the roadway, blew through the guard rails and landed on the highway’s service road, before fleeing the scene on foot, according to authorities.
First responders found the woman with injuries on her body and pronounced her dead at the location. Her identity has yet to be released, pending family notification.
Paramedics brought the victim’s 38-year-old driver and a 40-year-old man from the second car that was hit to Jamaica Hospital, both with minor injuries, according to the authorities.
The woman is the fourth person to die in in a grisly weekend of overnight traffic violence on New York City’s streets.
On Friday night a motorist ran over and killed a pedicab driver in Midtown Manhattan. Two motorcyclists died in separate collisions, one on the Williamsburg Bridge Saturday and another who slammed into a railroad track in Brooklyn on Sunday.
Both previous weekends saw several New Yorkers injured and dead during nighttime crashes, including a horrific T-bone crash on Rockaway Boulevard near JFK Airport on July 24, which killed a mother and her 10-year-old daughter.
Road deaths are on pace to be higher in 2021 than during any other year of the Mayor Bill de Blasio administration, with more deaths during the first six months of this year than any other such period under hizzoner’s two terms, a recent report found.
On this stretch of the expressway there have been relatively few traffic incidents over the last 10 years, just five crashes with six people injured and another one crash and one injury on the service road at 116 Avenue, according to data from NYC Crash Mapper.
