Collision kills man, 96, riding in ambulette

Ulysses Taylor ventured north more than four decades ago from his native Georgia because New York offered more opportunity for African-Americans than a South coping with the legacy of Jim Crow laws, his family said.

The churchman, gardener, and farmer of tomatoes, collard greens and string beans just off Jericho Turnpike was fatally injured Wednesday evening when the ambulette he was riding in was hit by another car in East Northport.

Taylor, who raised nine children and had dozens of grandchildren and great-grandchildren, had become addled with Alzheimer's disease late in life. He was immobile, used a wheelchair and was totally reliant on his family in Huntington to feed, bathe, shave and nurse him.

The 96-year-old was returning Wednesday from a program for senior citizens in Kings Park where he'd been going for decades when the ambulette was struck from behind.

"He shouldn't have went out the way he went out," his son Sherman Taylor, 56, said Thursday as he prepared to make arrangements for his dad's burial. He added: "Maybe this is the way God wanted him to go out, but I don't see it that way."

Another ambulette passenger, Lorraine Shanahan, 71, of East Northport, was injured in the crash. It occurred after a mother driving with her twin 6-year-olds drove through a stop sign in East Northport and struck the rear of the ambulette, causing it to flip, said Det. Lt. Thomas O'Heir, commanding officer of Suffolk's Second Detectives Squad, which is investigating.

O'Heir said both Taylor and Shanahan were properly secured at the time of the crash.

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Police issued a traffic ticket to the mother and said she wasn't criminally charged. O'Heir said she told police she saw the stop sign only at the last moment and that it had been blocked from her line of vision by the sun and a tree.

Joe Lehrfeld, president of Care & Comfort Associates Inc. of Bohemia, which owns the ambulette, said its driver, Spiro Bekas, was in the hospital. "He's hurt," Lehrfeld said. "All he keeps doing is asking about everybody else."

Police said Bekas, whom the company said was state certified to drive ambulettes, suffered broken ribs and an injured shoulder.

The company has 40 ambulettes and about 50 employees, Lehrfeld said.

Taylor's grieving family Thursday showed a reporter the tidy room with framed photos of Ulysses and his wife, Emma, who died about seven years ago, where Taylor last lived.

"We didn't send him to a nursing home. We kept him here," his son Sherman said. He wept as he reflected on his father's death, near the dresser where Taylor's medicines lay and where his father's clothes lined up in the closet on the second floor of his daughter's home on Amsterdam Street.