Dangerous Roads newsletter: Anxiety and life-changing injuries in a village plagued by pedestrian crashes

When Arielle Martinez and I started working on the latest chapter of the Dangerous Roads series, about the risks of walking or cycling on Long Island with a focus on Hempstead Village, one of our first goals was to find a victim, or a victim’s relative, who would talk.

We wanted someone to convey the stakes of a story that leaned heavily on studies of pedestrian safety and analyses from planners and officials: In crashes, people get killed, lives get wrecked.

At Sno-Haus, the venerable ski and snowboard store with an outlet on North Franklin Street, salesman Rob Sedig and his colleagues said several vehicles have driven through the wall of their shop over the years. Sedig said he felt uncomfortable turning his back on traffic to hang banners outside. Village historian Reine Bethany, who moved into the village in the 1990s and raised her children there, said she was uneasy crossing some village streets because of traffic. Clariona Griffith, a former village trustee who runs a day care center on South Franklin Street, mentioned the safety locks installed there "so the kids don’t ever run out, because, God forbid ..."

They seemed to share a low-level, ambient anxiety. If you lived in this place, or worked here, it made sense to always be a little nervous. Living in heightened alertness to traffic and its risks made you safer. In that subtle way, even for people who have not experienced the extreme violence of a crash, dangerous traffic can be life-altering.

We found examples that were less subtle. One was in a lawsuit filed on behalf of Julio Sangurima-Caro, a housepainter in his 60s who was hit by a taxi when he stepped onto North Franklin Street just north of Fulton Avenue early one morning in 2021.

In a 2023 deposition, Sangurima-Caro said that when he was hit he was walking to the parking lot of a Home Depot, where he often found work as a day laborer.

He said he still woke daily with pain in his "head, my ear and my leg and everything. ... As soon as I wake up in the morning I have [a] headache." He needed a walker to get around, and had moved from Hempstead to New Jersey to live with his daughter because he could no longer care for himself. He couldn’t paint, reach the shower by himself, cook or clean. "Nothing," he said in Spanish through an interpreter. "I can’t do anything."

We didn't include Sangurima-Caro in our story because we couldn't reach him. We did reach his lawyer, Adam Sattler, who said the lawsuit involved "probably the worst injuries I’ve ever seen" in an auto case.

We also spoke with Gina Varela, whose 34-year-old son, Pierre Angelo Rodriguez, was hit and killed by a bus on West Columbia Street in 2021. Arielle found Varela’s name while searching crash lawsuits. After she left a business card at Varela’s Levittown home, Varela invited us to visit.

In the immaculate sitting room, two pictures of Rodriguez stared at us while we talked. Varela said she had been reluctant to seek counseling after the crash. She said she doesn’t go out much or visit family. She didn't express much emotion on her face or in her words. Only toward the end of our visit did she hint at the enormity of her response to loss, by talking about the effort she made to blunt the pain. During the day, her job, working with children as a teacher’s assistant, keeps her distracted, she said. At home, "I just sit and try to watch TV," she said. "I think I find comfort in that. I forget about everything."

Sangurima-Caro and Varela seemed trapped. The typical newspaper crash story doesn’t convey this sensation, because the story is often based on a police news release, reported and published hours or days after the crash. The horror hasn't had time to set. 

I thought I detected this sensation in Sangurima-Caro’s description of living in a broken body and in Varela’s retreat into work and television. For Varela the retreat also seemed like a way of coping, keeping the horror at bay.

Do you know of neighborhoods where it's dangerous to walk or cycle? What do you think should be done about it? Let us know at roads@newsday.com.

By Nicholas Spangler

nicholas.spangler@newsday.comspanglernewsday

Nicholas Spangler is a general assignment reporter and has worked at Newsday since 2010.