The one that got away
Brandy Williams, the pedestrian victim of a Long Island City hit-and-run last September, did everything she was supposed to do. She ID’d the perp who injured her before driving away by getting a license plate number. She then notified a cop at the scene, who also recorded two eyewitnesses in a police report.
Yet the assailant got away. And, after injuring Williams’ wrist and foot, went on to kill two tots months later by the same means. Damn right we’re outraged. If Dorothy Bruns, the medically addled motorist who plowed the same Volvo through a Brooklyn intersection last month, killing 4-year-old Abigail Blumenstein and 1-year-old Joshua Lew, had been properly prosecuted for that earlier bout of reckless driving, she just might have been taken off the road.
And so, we add a human failure to the breakdown in technology-enabled law — eight speed camera and red-light camera violations for Bruns’ car over 19 months, with no real consequences — to stop a proven menace before she killed.
Six months before the fatal Brooklyn crash, Williams gave her report on the incident, as did witnesses, to an NYPD sergeant in the highway squad — who then did not file the paperwork that would have alerted detectives to follow up.
It’s true, there would have been no certainty, even had detectives built a strong case, even had the Queens DA been willing and able to bring charges for fleeing the scene of an injury-causing collision, a misdemeanor, that Bruns would’ve been kept from getting back behind the wheel.
But criminal consequences taken seriously just might have prompted revelation of the disabling medical condition, multiple sclerosis, that police believe played a role in the Brooklyn tragedy, and led to orders for Bruns to stop driving.
If the toddler tragedy highlighted the limits of camera technology as presently applied to catch brazen recidivists, the Williams incident highlights the ripple effects of cops treating with a shrug hit-and-runs resulting in less than a fatality or severe mangling.
Mayor de Blasio’s Vision Zero, to make the streets safer for pedestrians, is a noble crusade. It needs sharper teeth.