Ice-cream truck driver strikes, drags 11-year-old

An 11-year-old boy was clinging to life Saturday after he was struck and then dragged by an unlicensed Mister Softee ice cream truck driver while riding his new bike down the block from his Brooklyn home, police and witnesses said.

Bleeding from his head and struggling to breathe through his collapsed lungs, little Tyson Anderson turned to a gathering crowd at the crash site at Sutter Avenue and Hendrix Street in East New York with imploring eyes Friday evening, wondering if he was going to see another day.

“He said ‘Am I gonna die? Am I gonna die?’” witness Brian Franklin, 65, told the Daily News on Saturday. Tyson managed to give Franklin his address, but the panicked child couldn’t remember his phone number.

“Everybody came out,” Franklin recalled. “They went banging on doors, and the mother came up, by the time she came up he was already in the ambulance.”

Tyson was in the crosswalk about 6:45 p.m. when the ice-cream truck clipped him, knocking him off his bike, witnesses told police.

The child and his bike fell underneath the truck and were dragged for a short distance before a group of young girls witnessing the carnage ran up to the truck, demanding he stop, horrified witnesses told police.

Tyson suffered serious injuries to his head and body and was rushed to Brookdale University Medical Center, where he underwent surgery Saturday, his heartbroken father Anthony Anderson said outside the family’s apartment down the block from the crash scene.

“His lungs collapsed, he broke a couple of bones by his lung,” Anderson, 29 said. “(The doctors) just fixed it this morning.”

Tyson had just graduated elementary school, said his father, who had just moved his family to Hendrix Street. The bike Tyson was riding was a gift from his school for his exemplary grades.

“He just brought some trophies home,” said the proud dad, exhausted after a night in the hospital. “(He got) like first place for everything. He’s one of eight but he’s the smartest kid you could know.”

The ice-cream truck driver was taken into custody after police determined he was driving with a suspended license.