Two pedestrians were killed and five more people were injured in a head-on collision that led to one driver jumping the curb at a dangerous Inwood street early Wednesday morning, according to police.
The two men were fatally struck by a driver after the motorist collided with another driver and jumped the curb on Sherman Avenue near W. 207th Street just after 4 a.m. on Aug. 3, according to police and witness footage from the scene.
NYPD identified the victims as 31-year-old Joel Adames, who lived just around the corner on Isham Street, and 40-year-old Bronx resident David Fernandez.
Surveillance footage published by ABC7 New York shows a BMW driver heading north on Sherman Avenue, blowing through a red light at a high speed and T-boning a Subaru driver at the intersection.
The crash sent the Subaru into unoccupied parked cars before mounting the sidewalk and hitting the two pedestrians.
Paramedics brought Adames to NewYork-Presbyterian Allen Hospital and Fernandez to Harlem Hospital, where they were pronounced dead.
Five other people were injured in the crash, but they are in stable condition, according to an NYPD spokesperson.
The drivers of both vehicles stayed on the scene but police have not made any arrests.
Video footage posted on the Citizen App shows mangled cars, including the Subaru remaining on the sidewalk.
The Subaru’s license plate has been caught speeding in a school zone and blowing a red light in the Bronx on Jan. 19, according to state records collected by the website How’s My Driving NY. The BMW’s plate number could not immediately be obtained.
Sherman Avenue is a roadway that has been known to city officials to be dangerous for years.
There have been a whopping 55 crashes injuring 72 people at the intersection of W. 207th over the past 11 years, including 40 people inside cars, 29 pedestrians, three cyclists, according to city data visualized by the website Crash Mapper.
Nearly 100 crashes have happened during that timeframe when taking just one block in each direction into account on Sherman Avenue, injuring 136 and killing one person in a car at the junction of W. 204th Street.
In an effort to make the thoroughfare safer, the Department of Transportation cut two of four vehicle lanes on the two-way street in 2015, adding unprotected bike lanes and dedicated left turns.
The turning lanes switch sides on both approaches to the intersection and again mid-block along the stretch of Sherman Avenue where the crash happened.
Street safety advocates called on the city to redesign streets to make them safer and for the state to lift a cap on automated enforcement technology like red light cameras.
“Walking on the sidewalk should not be a death sentence, yet, today, like too many other days in this city, it was,” said Transportation Alternatives Executive Director Danny Harris in a statement. “We send our deepest condolences to the family and loved ones of the two people killed in the preventable crash uptown this morning.”
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