A group of men was congregating outside a Manhattan barbershop as they often did on Friday, when a drunk driver who had already crashed his SUV into a parked car plowed straight into them.
Two of the victims in the vehicular rampage died at the scene of the crash, and three more were in critical condition after the tragic crash. Emergency responders rushed the injured to St. Luke’s Hospital for treatment, according to NBC4 New York.
The New York Times named the drunk driver as Elvin Suarez. The outlet added:
Officials identified the victims on Saturday as Jason Negron, 46, and Michael Saint-Hilaire, 35. Mr. Negron lived about a mile south of the crash, while Mr. Saint-Hilaire lived farther away on the Upper East Side, according to the police.
Two other pedestrians, a 36-year-old man and a 44-year-old man, and the driver of the van were hospitalized and in stable condition, the police said.
The original 6 p.m. report to police said merely that a driver had lost control of his car and hit a group of people on a sidewalk close to the West 109th Street and Amsterdam Avenue intersection. As noted above, the driver of the Mercedes-Benz SUV first hit a parked car two blocks away on West 109th before erratically careening off the road and up onto the sidewalk outside the barbershop.
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Two men were killed and three other people were critically injured when a driver lost control of his S.U.V. on Amsterdam Avenue in Manhattan on Friday evening and crashed into a crowd of people, a spokeswoman for the Police Department said — NYT pic.twitter.com/1c5JTeqgds
NBC4 New York shared a few other details from the crash:
Video showed at least three people standing behind a brown van before the SUV crashed into it. A witness said one man was stuck under the car, while another person was left bleeding.
Those who live nearby said the area in front of the barbershop is a popular hang out spot for many in the close-knit community.
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Police confirmed to the press that the driver was intoxicated at the time of the crash. The deadly drunk is now in law enforcement custody pending charges.
As of Saturday, Suarez faces charges of manslaughter, assault, and driving while intoxicated, according to The New York Times.
A cyclist was in the bike lane at the time of the crash, according to an interview that was posted on X with a woman who witnessed the events and said she was a neighbor. The cyclist was struck and thrown to the sidewalk, she said, where emergency workers tried to perform CPR. After the crash, the woman said, another man was trapped beneath the black S.U.V. None of the details could be independently confirmed on Friday evening.
In typical fashion, the media is all reporting that “a car” crashed into the victims and the other vehicles, as if a car were somehow capable of committing attacks by its own agency. It’s the same nonsense rhetoric Democrats use about guns, especially “assault rifles.” In fact, whether a car or an assault weapon is the instrument of death, it is the person using said instrument who is responsible.
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