Hit-and-run drivers killed two people and another person is hanging onto his life after three crashes happened in Brooklyn and Manhattan within less than 24 hours Sunday.
A driver of a Nissan Pathfinder SUV jumped the curb in Canarsie on Sept. 4 and killed an elderly man, before bolting and abandoning the vehicle a few blocks away.
The car’s license plate had more than a dozen speeding, red light, and parking violations attached to it over the past seven years.
The crash happened just after 11:30 p.m. when the motorist made a “wide” left turn while heading south on Remsen Avenue onto Avenue M eastbound, according to the NYPD police report.
The driver mounted the southern sidewalk and struck 65-year-old Ali Alshawesh, who was walking east just a little over a block away from his Canarsie Road home.
Paramedics rushed Alshawesh to Brookdale Hospital where he was pronounced dead.
The driver fled the scene, abandoned the car five blocks away on E. 96th Street, and remains on the loose, cops said.
The SUV’s license plate was caught breaking the law 13 times since late 2015, including four times for speeding and twice for blowing red lights, largely in and around Canarsie, state records show.
The city’s Department of Transportation labelled Remsen Avenue from Seaview Avenue to Avenue B as a high crash corridor, with four deaths and 553 injuries from collisions along that stretch between 2012-2016.
The carnage followed two earlier hit-and-runs in Manhattan Sunday, starting uptown, when a male pedestrian was struck by a driver on W. 147th Street and Riverside Drive at 2:40 a.m.
Paramedics rushed the victim to NYC Health + Hospitals/ Harlem, where he died.
Police have not yet identified him, but a spokesperson said he was in his 50s.
An hour-and-a-half later just after 4 a.m. another SUV driver mowed down a man trying to cross W. 42nd Street in Midtown, before fleeing the scene.
The pedestrian was brought to Bellevue Hospital where he is in critical condition.
The deaths followed the horrific killing of 5-year-old Jonathan Martinez by a hit-and-run pickup truck driver in Queens Thursday evening.
