A 60-year-old man died days after he was struck by a hit-and-run cyclist in Manhattan, police said.
Michael Collopy, of Harlem, was hit by an unidentified bicyclist in a marked bike lane on Sixth Avenue and 23rd Street in the Flatiron District shortly before noon on July 31, police said.
Collopy was taken to NYC Health + Hospitals/Bellevue with head trauma and died five days later. The cyclist did not stay at the scene, cops said.
Police initially said the medical examiner determined that Collopy’s cause of death was a result of the collision, but a spokeswoman for the Office of the Medical Examiner later said the cause and manner of death were pending determination.
Collopy is the second pedestrian to die after being hit by a bicyclist in the city this year. On April 24, Donna Sturm, 67, was walking across 57th Street in a crosswalk between Fifth and Sixth Avenues when she was hit by a 42-year-old cyclist, police said.
She succumbed to her injuries 10 days after the collision. The cyclist stayed at the scene and was not arrested.
Transportation Alternatives, an advocacy group that has called for more protected bike lanes following a spike in cyclist deaths this year, said Collopy’s death was “a tragedy and could have been prevented.”
“Every person killed on New York’s streets is one too many, regardless of the type of vehicle by which they’re struck,” the group’s deputy director, Marco Conner, said in a statement Thursday. “New Yorkers who bike have a duty to always yield to pedestrians, the most vulnerable users of our streets.”
Conner also noted that cyclist-pedestrian crashes account for less than 1 percent of the total pedestrian deaths in the city in recent years.
