By Jefferson Siegel
On Tuesday night, friends and family of an aspiring Williamsburg musician killed by an unknown driver joined with safety advocates at W. 12th St. along the Hudson River to mark a sad one-year anniversary.
Last year, Joshua David Crouch, 24, was struck and killed along the West Side Highway.
“There was never really any closure to what happened here,” Morgan Lamarre, Crouch’s friend and roommate, said to a crowd of 75 people standing along the bike path by the highway.
Crouch’s father, James Crouch, is angry his son’s killer remains at large.
“I feel like they know something but they’re not telling me anything,” he said of the authorities. James Crouch said the police theorize that Joshua wandered, drunk, to the West Side Highway where he was struck in the early morning hours.
James Crouch decried several inconsistencies in the investigation, including no witnesses on a busy highway, his son’s missing wallet and an S.U.V. that a firefighter saw pulled over near the scene that was not mentioned in the police report. The case remains unsolved.
Many in the crowd were close friends and fellow musicians of Joshua. Several wore T-shirts adorned with his photo.
“He is the fire that ignited a lot of what we’ve done here,” Lamarre said as cyclists pedaling by dinged their bells. “We love him, right?” Lamarre yelled out, and the crowd yelled back in unison, “Yeah!”
Joshua was part of the group MINDSpray, a hip-hop outfit formed one night at an open mic. Joshua’s emcee name was LEFTist.
“He was the sincerest person ever,” said close friend Rebecca Tredanari, who attended many of his performances.
Others noted how the tragedy had brought them together.
“In a city of 8 million people — that’s a lot of lonely people,” said Joshua’s band mate Gabriel Kennedy, a.k.a. Propaganda. “And I don’t feel that,” he added.
After a plaque honoring Joshua was mounted on a pole, the crowd quietly marched through the West Village and Chelsea to mount three more plaques for pedestrians killed by motor vehicles.
At W. 15th St. near the highway, a plaque naming Timothy Royes, a 42-year-old music video director from the U.K., was attached to a pole.
Plaques were also mounted at 16th St. and Ninth Ave., where 82-year-old Amelia Chimienti was struck and killed last February, and at 23rd St. and Ninth Ave. where senior citizen Irene Yevelson, a resident of Penn South, was killed in May.
The Pedestrian Memorial Walk was organized by Transportation Alternatives, a nonprofit group that advocates for better bicycling, walking and public transit and fewer cars. The plaques were crafted by Visual Resistance, a group that has placed white-painted “ghost bikes” throughout the city at locations where cyclists have been killed by cars.
