As traffic deaths go, the case of 3-year-old Allison Liao may be one of the saddest.
What makes this traffic death particularly disturbing is that the incident — just one among the nearly 300 that occur in New York City every year — was captured on video, by chance, by a dashboard camera on a passing vehicle.
On October 6 of last year, the little girl was crossing Main Street in Flushing, with the light, in a crosswalk, holding her grandmother’s hand. The two were about half way across the street when a black Nissan SUV made a left turn, sucked Allison under a tire and knocked her grandmother, Chin Hua, to the ground.
The entire left turn, and the death and serious injury it caused, took about two seconds. The 44-year old driver, Ahmed Abu-Zayedeh, has suffered no official consequences from his action. The Queens D.A. declined to prosecute because the driver wasn’t impaired. But he did receive two tickets: failure to yield to a pedestrian and failure to use due care.