Quantcast

Senior pedestrian dies from injuries days after Queens crash

Northern boulevard
The stretch of Northern Boulevard where local Thomas Soong was struck by a driver on March 11.
Google

An octogenarian died of his injuries three days after a driver hit him at a dangerous street in a Queens crash, according to police.

Thomas Soong, 88, perished on March 14 after sustaining serious head injuries when a motorist struck him on March 11 on Northern Boulevard between 146th and 147th streets in Murray Hill, just a block away from his home.

The driver was coming out of a restaurant parking lot shortly after 9:20 p.m. and crossed the roadway’s double-yellow line and painted median to make a left turn, when he hit the senior citizen in the left-most eastbound lane.

Soong was trying to traverse the street in the opposite direction from south to north at the time, in the middle of the block and outside the marked crosswalk, cops said, but a police spokesperson could not say where they got that piece of information from.

Paramedics found the octogenarian lying in the road with head injuries and rushed him to NewYork-Presbyterian Queens Hospital in serious condition, and he succumbed to his wounds three days later.

The 52-year-old male driver stayed on the scene and police have not made any arrests.

Soong is the third pedestrian to die on that 343-foot stretch of Northern Boulevard since August 2011, according to data collected by the website NYC Crash Mapper, with two other fatalities at the intersections of 146th and 147th streets.

There have been 68 previous crashes there during that timeframe, injuring 80 people, according to the data.

Six of the collisions were near the same parking lot’s exit, injuring seven people, six of them pedestrians.

The short stretch along the six-lane Northern Boulevard has no marked crossings between the intersections, but is littered with three such parking lots where drivers cross the sidewalk to enter and exit the road.