A 3-year-old girl was killed, and several others injured, when a garbage truck rear-ended the car they were riding in the Bronx Saturday morning, according to the NYPD.
A Chevy Malibu carrying the child and three of her family members was traveling north on Bruckner Boulevard when it slowed down to go over a construction ramp and was rear-ended by the garbage truck about 10 a.m., according to the NYPD and city officials.
The toddler, Sophia Aguirre, was in a car seat when the privately owned sanitation truck swerved to avoid a parked car and rear-ended the Chevy Malibu, causing it to careen into a metal pole, police said.
Sophia was taken to Lincoln Hospital where she was pronounced dead. Her three relatives — a 27-year-old woman, a 52-year-old man, and a 52-year-old woman — were also taken to Lincoln Hospital for treatment, police said.
The crash occurred between East 144th Street and Southern Boulevard. The driver of the truck remained on scene, and no criminality is suspected, according to the NYPD.
The city’s Department of Transportation recently ripped out the surface of this stretch of Bruckner Boulevard for a milling project, causing the roadway to be “bumpy” and exposing a manhole cover that’s normally level with the street, according to the agency’s spokesman Scott Gastel. Milling is the removal of the top layer of a road.
DOT crews had installed a ramp with asphalt that sloped around the manhole cover, Gastel said.
The work on the street is part of a broader road resurfacing project, he added.
It was not immediately clear if there was any signage on the street that alerted drivers to road conditions, but Gastel said the road is scheduled to be repaved in the next few weeks.
“We removed the whole upper surface on the roadway,” Gastel said. “It’s bumpy, kind of a pebbly hard surface.”
DOT staff immediately went to the scene after the crash to make sure there weren’t any issues with the street, and determined it was safe, but the agency is still investigating the incident, Gastel said.
With reporting by Alison Fox
