Cops: Driver hurt on LIE in Dix Hills after errant tire hits her car
A tow truck driver with a tire that crashed through a car windshield Wednesday on the LIE, injuring a motorist, Suffolk police said. Credit: James Carbone
A woman was hospitalized Wednesday after a tire came off a car on the westbound Long Island Expressway in Dix Hills, crossed the median, and hit her eastbound 2008 Hyundai, Suffolk police said.
The injured driver's identity was not released. She was transported to Good Samaritan Hospital Medical Center in West Islip with non-life-threatening injuries, police said.
The freak accident occurred about 1:30 p.m. near Exit 51, police said.
A Cadillac sedan heading west on the LIE lost the tire, which then bounded over the median divider wall and struck "the roof and the windshield" of the eastbound Hyundai, according to police.
Following the accident, a man in an SUV traveling in front of the injured woman and described by cops as a good Samaritan "slowed his vehicle down to force the Hyundai to come to a stop," police said.
Though recent accident statistics from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration were not immediately available, studies by the agency in the early 2000s found that road debris accounted for less than 1% of all highway accidents. Recent studies by the AAA found road debris accounts for about 50,000 accidents — and about 100 deaths — annually in the United States.
In November 1998, famed director Alan J. Pakula, 70, who counted "To Kill a Mockingbird," "All the President's Men" and "Sophie's Choice" among the 23 films he directed, was killed on the LIE when a car ran over a section of pipe dropped on the roadbed by a truck — launching the pipe into the air and propelling it through the windshield of his Volvo.
John Valenti, a reporter at Newsday since 1981, has been honored nationally by the Associated Press and Society of the Silurians for investigative, enterprise and breaking news reporting, as well as column writing, and is the author of “Swee'pea,” a book about former New York playground basketball star Lloyd Daniels. Valenti is featured in the Emmy Award-winning ESPN 30-for-30 film “Big Shot.”
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