A Brooklyn woman was struck and killed crossing the street last night by a hit-and-run driver who sent her flying nearly 20 feet, police and witnesses said.
The 50-year-old victim, whose name was withheld pending family notification, was crossing Utica Avenue at Avenue N in Flatlands shortly before 9 p.m.
The driver who hit her was heading south on Utica. Post photographer William C. Lopez, who witnessed the fatal accident, was driving home in the northbound lane.
Lopez said the victim had been crossing against a red light and “seemed not to be aware of the traffic around her.”
“She was on the double yellow line,” he said. “I noticed a blank expression on her face and said to my passengers, ‘This woman is going to get killed.’ I heard a loud thud the very instant that I finished that sentence.”
Lopez parked his car to block any other vehicles from hitting the woman.
“I didn’t want to look at her. I thought she was going to be in pieces,” Lopez said. “But she wasn’t. She was face-down. She had been knocked out of her shoes – easily 20 feet.”
A large crowd had already gathered.
Several witnesses said it sounded like two cars hitting each other.
“This one guy said, ‘Oh, my God! I can’t believe he hit a person. That was so loud,’ ” Lopez said.
He and a doctor who was in the car behind him, tried to aid the woman.
“When I got there, she was unresponsive,” Lopez said.
“The doctor was checking for a pulse. He couldn’t feel it.”
The victim was pronounced dead at Brookdale Hospital.
Witnesses said the driver briefly stayed at the scene.
“He got completely out of the car,” said a woman who asked that her name not be printed.
“When he saw she wasn’t moving, he fled.”
Lopez, too, saw the car stop.
“It didn’t initially strike me as a hit and run,” he said.
“While the doctor was checking the pulse, I looked up – and, all of a sudden, the car was gone.”
Police are looking for a dark-green 1996 or 1997 Nissan Maxima with tinted windows and temporary license tags on the back.
The driver is described as a black man in his 20s, wearing a striped shirt.
He fled south on Utica Avenue according to witnesses.
Lopez said that the driver would probably not have been in trouble had he stayed at the scene.
“He probably just panicked,” he said. “Everyone was saying she was dead.”
Additional reporting by Tatiana Deligiannakis