A Brooklyn man biking near his home Friday night was killed on Atlantic Avenue by a driver of a light-colored vehicle who then fled the scene, the NYPD said, the latest fatality in a marked increase in deaths caused by drivers this year.
Around 10:10 p.m., Jose Ramos, 56, was biking north on Essex Street at Atlantic Avenue in Cypress Hills when the driver of the vehicle, heading west on Atlantic, struck him in the marked crosswalk at the intersection, police said.
The driver did not stop and continued west on the avenue, leaving Ramos behind. Police responded to a 911 call and took Ramos to Interfaith Medical Center where he was pronounced dead. The NYPD Highway District's Collision Investigation Squad is continuing the investigation.
Ramos’s family could not be immediately reached Saturday.
(Update: Streetsblog spoke to Ramos's wife Martha who said she was with him at the time of his death: "Martha said she and Jose, who was walking with his bicycle, stopped in the median of Atlantic at Essex Street, and waited for the light when the sedan “came out of nowhere” and slammed into Jose. The car, she said, was “racing” down Atlantic — an extremely common occurrence, she said.
“Everything happened so fast,” Martha said.)
NYPD said the driver was in a white or light-colored sedan and gave no other details about the driver or car. Two different police spokespersons could not say whether there were witnesses or video footage of the crash. Employees of a pharmacy at the intersection of Atlantic and Essex said all nearby businesses would have been closed late Friday night.
In what has turned out to be an especially deadly year for fatal car collisions, Ramos is at least the 15th cyclist killed this year by drivers, according to street safety advocates Transportation Alternatives. That’s more than half the number of cyclists killed in all of 2020, which was a record high year, since de Blasio took office and launched Vision Zero. Citywide, 207 people have been killed by vehicles so far this year, a 15% increase over this time last year.
Transportation Alternatives singled out Brooklyn as being a particularly dangerous borough for victims of collisions with more fatalities happening in the first nine months of this year than the full years in 2020, 2018, 2017, and 2016.
“New York City reached 200 fatalities for the year on October 2, the earliest point in the calendar year to do so in the de Blasio-era. In 2018, it took until December 20 to reach 200 fatalities. Other than 2014, no other year reached this grim milestone before November,” said Transportation Alternatives in an October 6th report.
In the ten days since Transportation Alternatives released that report, Ramos and another bicyclist have been struck and killed by drivers.
