Francois Cadely, a 70-year-old driver, was killed and his 60-year-old passenger critically injured when the car they were traveling in fell 40 feet from the parking lot of a McDonald’s restaurant onto a Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) train lot yesterday in Brooklyn .
Cadely reportedly lost control of her vehicle after suffering a medical episode, crashed into a concrete barrier and went airborne to land on LIRR land around 12:41 pm yesterday on Vanderbilt Ave. near Pacific St. in Prospect Heights, just two blocks from the Barclays Center event site.
Cadely and her passenger were in an Audi Q5 in a McDonald’s parking lot on Atlantic Ave. when the driver made a right turn unexpectedly suffering from an unknown medical condition. The car kept spinning and ended up heading west before accelerating.
The speeding vehicle tore through a concrete barrier and fence lining the perimeter of the rail yard and plummeted 40 feet to the ground, NYPD said.
The Audi crashed to the ground on the driver’s side. First responders removed Cadely and the woman from the wrecked car and rushed them to New York-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital, where the driver died.
The woman remained in critical condition with extensive injuries to her chest and back on Saturday, it reported. Daily News, which published dramatic images of the accident. Cadely lived in Canarsie, about six miles from where she crashed, police said. It was not immediately clear her relationship to the unidentified passenger.
This year has been disastrous on New York asphalt in all five boroughs. From January 1 to July 31, some 150 people were killed in road accidents, according to the city’s Department of Transportation (DOT). Notably there is a 129% increase in hit and run incidents.
In addition to gun violence, traffic accidents are another big challenge for Mayor Eric Adams. This despite “Vision Zero”, a road safety plan created in 2014 by then-new mayor Bill de Blasio, who promised to make the city safer for pedestrians, cyclists and motorists, with a goal of zero deaths by 2024.
New York City had already experienced a 35% increase in traffic accidents in April, the NYPD alerted. At the end of that month there was a tragic streak to an average of one person killed by hit-and-run each day.