BY LINCOLN ANDERSON | The 60-year-old woman fatally struck by a private garbage truck on Tues., May 16, at Eighth St. and Sixth Ave., was an Ivy League-educated financial adviser and broker and a founding member of the W. Eighth St. Block Association.
As of last week’s Villager deadline, police had not yet released the victim’s name pending family notification.
Fern B. Jones lived at Nine W. Eighth St., near Fifth Ave. — a little less than a block away from where she was horrifically crushed by the carting truck.
Jones is listed as having financial businesses registered at Apartment No. 2 at Nine W. Eighth St. Her LinkedIn page lists her as having been president since 2005 of FJ Co, a company that “enhances portfolios.” Her jobs before that included director of portfolio management at MetLife, senior investment analyst for global fixed income for General Motors Asset Management, and mortgage analyst and a trader/risk manager at JPMorgan Chase. Jones received a bachelor of arts from Yale in 1981 and a master’s degree in management and finance from M.I.T. in 1998.
Members were informed of Jones’s death in a message on Mon., May 22, from Laurie Moody, secretary of the W. Eighth St. Block Association, on behalf of its co-chairpersons, Cormac Flynn and Carol Wilson.
“We remember Fern as a good friend and valued community member, who worked hard to improve the quality of life on our block,” the e-mail said, in part. “She will be greatly missed here.”
Sharon Woolums recalled Jones as “a very sweet, intelligent member of the block association. I saw Fern recently and am shocked by the news,” she said.
Jones’s sister Ruth told the block association that Fern will be buried in Virginia on Memorial Day weekend and that the family is planning a memorial in New York this summer.
Following the publication of a brief article about Jones’s death in last week’s Villager, a spokesperson for M&M Sanitation Corp. reached out to say the truck was going just 4 miles per hour when it hit Jones.
A Police Department spokesperson said she could not definitively answer how fast the truck was going at the time of the incident, and that the department’s Collision Investigation Squad was still investigating.
The New York Post reported Jones was crossing Sixth Ave. at W. Eighth St. when, according to witnesses, she was struck, then dragged and crushed under the tires of the mammoth garbage rig. Police said she had been trying to cross from the north side of W. Eighth St. to the south side.
