It was still dark when the driver of a stolen Honda CRV sped down a ramp off the Henry Hudson Parkway and careened out of control into a building in Upper Manhattan.
Flames immediately erupted from the rear of the vehicle, according to video surveillance footage released by a lawyer for the driver’s family on Thursday. About 10 seconds later, at 4:40 a.m. on April 2, the police car that had been chasing the S.U.V. drove down the same ramp. The flames had diminished but still appeared to be flickering when the cruiser, its siren lights off, reached the bottom of the ramp.
The officer driving the cruiser slowed down, but instead of turning toward the Honda he turned left on Dyckman Street in the Inwood neighborhood of Manhattan and left the wreckage behind. The driver, Francisco A. Guzman Parra, 31, died from blunt impact injuries to the head and torso and “thermal injuries,” according to the medical examiner’s office.
The video, which the family obtained from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, gave the first visual account of a crash that is now being investigated by the Manhattan district attorney’s office and led to the suspension of the two officers in the cruiser. Mr. Guzman Parra’s family said the video confirmed what they had feared for months: that the police left him to die.
“They could have helped get him out,” said Carmen Colon, his stepmother, who, along with Mr. Guzman Parra’s sisters, spoke with reporters after watching the video at their lawyer’s office in Lower Manhattan.
“I think that when we see that video we’re seeing a crime being committed,” she said.
About 16 minutes after the crash, firefighters and officers from the 34th Precinct, which covers Inwood, received a 9-1-1 call about a car on fire. When they arrived, they found the Honda fully engulfed in flames.
The medical examiner’s office ruled the death an accident. The state attorney general’s office, which is charged with investigating deaths caused by the police, determined that the officers did not cause Mr. Guzman Parra’s death and referred the case to the Manhattan district attorney’s office.
Doug Cohen, a spokesman for District Attorney Alvin L. Bragg Jr., said his office was investigating the incident, and declined to comment further.
Manhattan prosecutors have told the family they are looking into several charges, including officer misconduct, according to Jeremy G. Feigenbaum, the family’s lawyer.
In a statement, the police declined to comment on the video and said the “incident remains under investigation by the force investigation division.”
The names of the officers, who work in the 50th Precinct, which covers the northwestern section of the Bronx, have not been released. Patrick Hendry, the president of the Police Benevolent Association, has defended the actions of the officers, saying that they were patrolling a section of the Bronx where there had been numerous reports of auto crime when they saw a car they believed had been stolen.
Mr. Hendry has said that video evidence he had reviewed “shows that the vehicle was not on fire when the officers were in the vicinity” and that the officers did not see the car when they came off the ramp.
On Thursday, a union spokesman who reviewed the film provided by the family referred back to Mr. Hendry’s original statement and disputed that the car was on fire when the cruiser reached the bottom of the ramp.
Mr. Feigenbaum said that members of the police accountability unit within the district attorney’s office had told him and the family that, after the crash, the officers went back to their precinct and did not report the crash or that they had lost sight of a stolen car.
Mr. Feigenbaum said it was difficult to believe that two officers chasing a stolen car down a ramp would not have seen it crashed across the street.
“There’s just simply no plausible way you miss this,” Mr. Feigenbaum said.
The crash occurred about three months after Jessica S. Tisch, the police commissioner, announced that officers would no longer engage in high-speed chases of drivers who broke traffic laws or committed other low-level offenses. The change was made to address the number of crashes that have led to serious injuries and deaths in the most densely populated major city in the United States.
Mr. Hendry has said the policy announced by the commissioner “authorizes police officers to initiate a pursuit” under circumstances like those involving the stolen car Mr. Guzman Parra was in.
After the cruiser left the scene, the video shows the fire growing until the Honda was fully engulfed in flames. The car burned under the overpass as vehicles zoomed overhead on the parkway.
Shakira Guzman, Mr. Guzman Parra’s younger sister, said the possibility that her brother might have been alive all that time has tortured her family.
“We try not to think about his last moments because that’s what keeps us up at night,” Ms. Guzman, 27, said.
Mr. Guzman Parra came from the Dominican Republic as a young boy and was undocumented, having dropped out of school around the eighth grade. He struggled to find steady work beyond occasional construction and painting gigs, according to his family.
Ms. Colon, 53, said the family still did not know what he was doing in a stolen car. He had been in trouble before for minor offenses like shoplifting but had never been imprisoned or charged with a felony crime.
If he had stolen a car, he should have been arrested, she said.
“Get him to the hospital, cuffed to the bed and process him,” Ms. Colon said. “But you don’t leave him there to die, to burn.”
It was especially painful to think that NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital was only about a mile away from where her stepson died, Ms. Colon said. A fire station was half a mile away.
Maria Cramer is a Times reporter covering the New York Police Department and crime in the city and surrounding areas.
The post Video Shows Fiery Fatal Crash After Police Chase appeared first on New York Times.
