ECHO OF TRAGEDY

Daughter nearly killed by car on same spot where ma was run down

Lisbeth Arce weeps in hospital recounting how cruel driver crushed her legs and left her in agony on Bronx street.

A woman whose legs were crushed by a hit-and-run driver last month said she was certain she was going to die — just as her own mother did two years ago when a heartless motorist mowed her down the same Bronx street.

Lisbeth Arce, 50, was trying to cross Pitman Ave. at Wickham Ave. in Wakefield when a dark-colored pickup truck backed into her, crushing her legs with the rear wheels shortly before 8 p.m. on Sept. 22.

About two years earlier, on Oct. 6, 2017, Arce’s mother, Hilda Arocho, 82, who lived across the street from her daughter, died beneath the wheels of a speeding hit-andrun driver’s van just minutes after packing supplies for family members in hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico.

Arocho’s suspected killer,

Alcyto Powell, who lived a mile away from her, surrendered to police a day later, and was charged with leaving the scene of a fatal accident.

The driver who wiped out Arce is still at large, cops said.

“It feels like my mom ran to me and protected me,” Arce said through tears from her hospital bed at Westchester Medical Center in Valhalla. “It’s not my time.”

Arce said she is afraid to return home and cross the same street. But she is trying to teach her kids to overcome their fears.

“My mother was killed in the same spot, identical spot, just two years before,” Arce explained. “My daughter came out, and I have a son with special needs. They all saw me on the ground in the same spot where I cuddled my mother’s body.”

Crossing the street again would be easier, Arce said, if she knew the motorist who nearly killed her was no longer on the road.

“They should revoke his license,” Arce told the Daily News. “To stop, look and continue is a choice you made as a human being to be subhuman.”

She doesn’t know whether the driver deserves jail but said “It should be a big penalty.”

Arce, an eighth-grade teacher, has seen the disturbing video of herself beneath the wheels of a truck. She said she is convinced that a light that moves across the frame is an angel that came to her

rescue.

“It looks like an angel that’s coming to stop the car,” Arce said. “My mom’s like, ‘You’re not hitting my little girl.’”

Her children, ages 14, 17 and 19, have also seen the gruesome video, which shows a large vehicle striking Arce in the dark, and backing over her legs.

As she writhes near the curb in obvious agony, the driver speeds away into the night.

“He did see me because he pulled over on the side,” Arce explained. “I screamed, ‘You hit me,’ And then he went down the block. So I know that they saw me.”

Arce has endured several surgeries to repair a broken right ankle, and a thigh muscle that separated from the bone.

“Thank God she’s hanging tough,” Arce’s husband, Raul Gonzalez, explained. “She’s like, ‘You know what, I cannot believe that this happened to me two years after it happened to my mother, like, right there on the same spot.’ ”

Arce, who requires at least two more surgeries, shared her outrage after her mother died.

“My mother was the embodiment of the American dream,” Arce told The News at the time. “She didn’t depend on anybody. She doesn’t deserve to die that way, If they were going 25 miles per hour, they would have hurt but not killed her. And then she was just thrown on the side like roadkill.”

After Arocho’s death, the family pushed for a four-way stop at the corner.