An elderly woman is in critical condition after being struck by a minivan on The Bowery this morning. Authorities say the woman was crossing west on Bowery at Bayard street around 6:30 a.m. when she was hit by the minivan in the crosswalk. "I think she was hit pretty hard, because she wasn't moving on the ground at all," said Frazier, a security guard for the adjacent Confucius Plaza apartments who saw the immediate aftermath of the incident and declined to give his last name. An NYPD spokesman said that the woman has two broken legs, and remains in critical condition at Cornell Hospital. The driver of the van was being questioned at the scene, and the spokesman said that criminality has not yet been determined.
An officer from the NYPD's Accident Investigation Squad visited the nearby First American International Bank to view their surveillance camera, according to a bank employee who was not authorized to speak with a reporter. "They looked but it's too dark, and the angle's too bad," the employee said. "You can't really see anything, so you can't tell if [the driver] ran the light or not." The employee said that she was told the victim is in her eighties.
The van's driver, a man in his thirties, declined to be interviewed. In September, a 72-year-old woman was accidentally struck by an NYPD traffic vehicle several yards south of today's incident.
