‘Just looking for answers’
Heartbroken wife puzzled by hub’s fatal b’dayy e-bike crash
A young Bronx restaurant worker and dad of two little boys was celebrating his 29th birthday with a friend just before he was killed in a gruesome crash of his e-bike in the Bronx, his heartbroken wife told the Daily News.
Juan Licurgo Cruz’s adoring wife, Carmela Parra, 28, said Sunday she can’t imagine how she’ll live without him, describing her husband as a hardworking food preparation worker at a Chinese restaurant who toiled to help provide for their two sons, ages 9 and 10.
Yet even now, she doesn’t know exactly how and why her husband died.
Cruz slammed into the back of a 2019 Toyota Highlander parked on E. 149th St. near Brook Ave. in Mott Haven about 12:45 a.m. on Thursday, cops said.
Video obtained by The News shows him riding in a bus lane on the empty street, as he slowly veers off course and runs into the back of the SUV.
Parra said she’s puzzled by why
Cruz didn’t have his phone, his ID or the chain he always wore when police found him.
“I’m just looking for answers for everything, but unfortunately the police don’t want to tell me anything,” she said in Spanish, her eyes filled with tears as she sat in her sons’ bedroom.
“Where are his things? They don’t want to give me answers.”
Parra learned about her beloved husband’s death the next day; he was brought to Lincoln Hospital, but he was known only as a “John Doe,” nameless without any identification.
Parra said Cruz was coming home after a long day at work, and stopped at a friend’s house nearby for a few beers to celebrate his birthday. Even though he’d been drinking, she wondered if something happened to him to leave him disoriented, and without his personal items.
“He’s strong. This would never have happened to him,” she told The News. “I’m not going to say he didn’t drink, he did. But he never drank a lot. He always came home fine. He was drinking, he was happy, because it was his birthday. He said, ‘I’m only going to drink four beers, and then come home.’
“I said, ‘OK, but be careful.’ He said, ‘Of course.’ He called me that last time, and now I won’t hear him anymore.”
Parra and Cruz were born in Mexico and met in the Bronx 11 years ago, in the building where Parra’s sister lives.
“He was the happiness of my life,” Parra said. “He always called me at 4, when he took his break at work, saying, ‘What are you doing, my love?’ When he called me it gave me the strength to keep going during the day.”
Cruz wanted to give his children a life he never had, she said.
“He always said, ‘ I’m going to give everything to my kids that I didn’t have when I was young, because my father abandoned me when I was little,’ “she recalled.
She said now, she’s looking for a therapist for the boys.
“I try to be strong for them. When I’m strong, they don’t feel the [pain]. But when I’m debilitated, they cry, they can’t believe it,” she said.
“The older one is asking how his father died, and I feel the same pain, because I don’t know how he died either. What answer am I going to give my son? I don’t know.”
Parra, who was a stay-at-home mom, must also find work to support herself and the children.
“Now, I’ll have to fight for them,” she said. “I’ll have to go to work.”