A UPS driver making his regular deliveries on Staten Island was maimed Monday when he was crushed against his truck by a car swerving to avoid a jaywalker, authorities and witnesses said.
Tom Ryan, 40, of Bayonne, NJ, cried out after a Toyota hit him at 9 a.m., ripping one of his legs off and leaving the other hanging by a thread, in front of Wil John’s Tire Empire on Hylan Boulevard.
“Tom was screaming. One of his legs was laying next to him under the truck,” said Moe Sattar, a mechanic at the tire shop. “He was screaming . . . Then he got quiet when he was bleeding out.”
Witnesses used a shirt as a tourniquet to stanch the bleeding where his leg was severed, while the other leg remained barely attached to his body, Sattar said.
Ryan was taken to Staten Island University North Hospital in serious condition and later transferred by helicopter to the trauma unit at Bellevue Hospital, FDNY sources said.
“As of right now, Tom is going to make it. He’s going to live, but that’s all I know at this point,” a UPS representative said.
Ryan is a married father of two, ages 8 and 9, and regularly made deliveries in the neighborhood, a local business manager said.
One of his children — a son named Malachy — was struck by a bus about four years ago, posts on Ryan’s Facebook page reveal.
Malachy was hit while walking home from school in January 2011 and “had a neck break brace on, a head restraint on and he was a bloody mess” after getting rushed to the hospital, Ryan wrote.
“Thankfully, not long after I got there they told me all the test were neg and he would be OK,” one post reads.
Jessica Scarlet, 20, a hairstylist at nearby Salon H2O, described Ryan as a “real nice guy,” adding that she “can’t believe this happened to him.”
The driver of the Toyota, which has North Carolina license plates, remained at the crash scene and told cops he was trying to avoid a pedestrian when he swerved and hit the UPS driver, law-enforcement sources said. Sattar backed up that account.
“A guy was crossing against the traffic light on Hylan Boulevard and Adams Avenue when a black Toyota Camry with a male teen driver tried to avoid him in street and slammed into back of UPS truck, crushing his legs,” he recalled.
Sattar, 22, and other witnesses said the jaywalker stopped to gawk but left before emergency responders got there.
The NYPD said there was no evidence of criminality, and no charges were filed against the Toyota driver.