A Staten Island man was arrested Friday morning in connection with a hit-and-run that killed two men, including one who was 80, on a Brooklyn street notorious for serious car crashes, the police said.
The man, Juventino Anastacio Florentino, 23, was arrested at 11:30 a.m. and booked on charges of manslaughter, criminally negligent homicide and leaving the scene of an accident, the police said. He was also accused of reckless driving, disobeying a red light and driving at an unreasonable speed, the police said.
The deadly crash happened on a particularly dangerous stretch of Third Avenue that runs beneath the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in the Sunset Park section of Brooklyn.
According to preliminary information provided by the police, Mr. Florentino was speeding south on Third Avenue in a BMW when he reached the intersection at 52nd Street. There, he drove through a red light and crashed into the two men, Kex Un Chen, 80, and Faqiu Lin, 59, who were walking in the crosswalk. After running the men down, Mr. Florentino sped away, the police said.
It was not immediately clear whether the two pedestrians knew each other.
Officers responding to a 911 call arrived at the intersection just before 4:30 a.m. Emergency medical workers followed soon after and pronounced the victims dead at the scene, the police said.
The section of Third Avenue where the crash occurred is dark, wide and includes little pedestrian infrastructure. It has been the site of numerous traffic injuries and deaths in recent years.
There have been 10 traffic death on the stretch of road from 62nd Street to Prospect Avenue since January 2020, according to Crash Mapper, a mapping tool created by the Clinton Hell’s Kitchen Coalition for Pedestrian Safety, a pedestrian-safety nonprofit that uses publicly available New York City government data. There have been 1,162 traffic-related injuries on the stretch during the same period.
Local community board members have for years pressed city officials to act urgently to overhaul the stretch of road. In 2023, the city Transportation Department proposed several designs for a street improvement project in the area, including a protected bike lane, which the community board approved.
But the city has delayed the project until at least next year after receiving resistance from local businesses, according to the transportation-focused website Streetsblog.
“It was a very tragic accident and unfortunately, it was avoidable,” said Julio Peña III, the community board chairman. The board, he added, had been asking the Transportation Department “for decades” to improve the conditions on Third Avenue.
“It’s a slap in the face to the victims’ families who’ve been affected by accidents and fatalities,” Mr. Peña said.
The city Transportation Department referred a request for comment to City Hall. A spokeswoman for Mayor Eric Adams did not immediately respond.
There had been 96 traffic deaths of all types in the city this year as of July 6, according to police data — a 29 percent decline from the same period last year, when there were an unusually high number of pedestrian deaths compared with the year before.
Maia Coleman is a reporter for The Times covering the New York Police Department and criminal justice in the New York area.
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