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A pedestrian was struck and critically injured by a vehicle moving at high speed at the intersection of West and Albany Streets on Thursday, January 4. Financial District resident Alison Bradshaw, who came upon the scene seconds after the man was hit, recalls, “I was heading out to pick up my children at P.S. 276, around 2:40 in the afternoon. When I got out of the elevator, there was panic in the lobby and around the front door. My doorman told me that a man had been run over on West Street, and that he had been hit with such force that he had been tossed through the air from the crosswalk, almost to the beginning of the left-turn lane,” on the northbound side of the street, where cars enter Battery Park City via Liberty Street.
“It was horrible,” she says. “There was blood covering a large area of pavement on West Street.” The victim was accompanied by a woman whose trousers were covered in blood. “She was hysterical,” Ms. Bradshaw recalls. “Her screams will haunt me forever.” Ms. Bradshaw says that her husband, surveying the scene from their apartment window, told her, “nobody could lose that much blood and survive.”
An employee of 90 West Street, a residential building located at the corner of West and Albany Streets (who asked not to be named), said, “the sports car that hit the man blew through a red light, moving really fast.”
In fact, the victim (whose name has not been released) did survive. “The driver’s insurance company called my neighbor, who was a witness, a few days later and said that man who has been hit was still alive and in the intensive care unit at the hospital,” Ms. Bradshaw says.
“I cross that street with my four children multiple times per day,” she says. “The intersection of Albany and West is a death trap. I see cars jump the light there almost daily. What will I do if I’m crossing with my children and another driver ignores the traffic light?”
A spokesman for the New York City Police Department confirmed more details of the accident: “on Thursday, January 4, at approximately 1445 hours, a 58-year-old male was operating a 2021 Alfa Romeo and was traveling northbound on West Street at the intersection of Albany Street, when he struck a 21-year-old male pedestrian, who was crossing West Street. The pedestrian sustained trauma about the body and was transported by EMS to NYC Health and Hospitals/Bellevue in stable condition. The operator of the vehicle was issued two summonses for failure to yield to a pedestrian and disobeying a traffic control device.”
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