Mowed down in B’klyn
Beloved mother figure, 60, killed in hit-and-run
A 60-year-old woman remembered as a motherly figure at the Brooklyn store where she worked was fatally struck by an unlicensed hit-and-run driver steps from her home, police said Thursday.
Elizabeth Perez was crossing in the middle of the block on Dahill Road near 63rd St. in Bensonhurst late Wednesday when an Acura TSX driver veered across the double yellow line into the southbound lane, cops said.
In video viewed by the Daily News, it appears the driver was avoiding a group of people standing in the road when he crossed onto the wrong side.
The passenger side of the Acura slammed into Perez around 10 p.m., police said. Medics rushed her to Maimonides Medical Center, but she could not be saved.
The Acura driver never stopped, but cops found the vehicle and driver nearby and took Yerlin Garcia, 24, into custody.
Perez lived steps from where she was struck and appeared to be heading home at the time of the crash.
The victim, who went by Liz, worked at a Dollar General store in Flatlands, where co-workers were stunned to learn of her death.
“She’s like the mother of the staff,” said employee Tia Griffin. “She had, like, grandma vibes. So just hearing about this is crazy.”
Perez had worked at the location for over two years on the weekends and would often take time out of her day to help colleagues figure out their personal problems, they recalled.
“If we [were] having a bad day, she’d be like a motherly figure,” said Griffin, 24. “She’d be like ‘All right, sit down. What happened?”
Perez worked another job during the week.
“I always tell her, you work too hard,” Griffin said. “You need to be on a beach with your feet up, drinking wine or something instead of working almost every day.”
Perez’s daughter was recently diagnosed with partial blindness and other health issues.
“She like kills herself working, and after that she takes care of her daughter.”
Another co-worker echoed the sentiment.
“She was a sweetheart, [none] of us never had anything bad to say about her or even heard her say anything bad about anyone else,” said Yelissa Jiminez, 25. “And she was so hardworking. I never heard her complain about anything.”
The women shared a video of Perez at work, where she was dancing and singing along to music playing in the background.
“We all loved Liz,” she said. “She would always make us laugh doing crazy things.”
Perez lived with her daughter and pets after her husband died several years ago.
“She would plan her daughter’s birthday for a whole month,” recalled Jiminez. “She would buy snacks, she would buy food, plan what she was cooking. She really looked forward to her daughter’s birthday.”
After a late-night shift, Griffin discovered that Perez lived near what she described as a dangerous intersection and started dropping the older woman off after work.
“The corner that she’s at, cars just be speeding right there,” Griffin said. “That’s why we drop her off in front of her house. I would always tell her to watch the cars over there.”
At the scene Thursday afternoon, neighbors and local business owners said drivers often zip up and down the street, which has no traffic lights to deter speeders.
“It’s long, it’s wide, so people speed too much and there’s no speeding camera over here,” said Waqar Azim, 38. “They need to put a light or a stop sign.”
Another neighbor told The News she fears for her children playing near the road.
“Last year, we ask for a light,” said the woman, who only wanted to be identified as MaDina. “Every morning, every afternoon, a lot of people cross and it’s very dangerous.”
Cops charged Garcia with leaving the scene of a fatal accident, aggravated unlicensed operation of a motor vehicle, operating a car without insurance and operating an unregistered vehicle.
“I don’t understand how people do that,” said Perez’s former neighbor, Nanci Williams. “To know in your brain that you did something like that? Hit somebody and left them like that?”
Garcia’s arraignment in Brooklyn Criminal Court was pending Thursday. He lives in Sunset Park, cops said.