A Brooklyn Nurse, Still in Her Scrubs, Was Killed Crossing the Street a Block From Her Hospital. Her Driver Has a 96 Percent Chance of Never Being Caught.
Jiayi Zheng, 28, had just finished an overnight shift on the medical-surgical unit at NYU Langone Hospital—Brooklyn and was six blocks from home. Surveillance video shows her standing at the corner of 55th Street and Third Avenue in Sunset Park, still in her hospital scrubs with a backpack over her shoulders, waiting for the light before she stepped into the crosswalk. She made it past the median. A black 2014 Cadillac sedan, its driver running the red light southbound on Third Avenue, hit her without slowing and sent her airborne. The driver tapped the brakes once, then kept going.
It happened just before 7:40 a.m. on Saturday, August 29, 2026— one block from the hospital where Zheng worked. Medics rushed her there. She died of her injuries in the building where, hours earlier, she had been treating patients.
“This is a tragic loss, and we extend our sincere condolences to her family, loved ones, and colleagues,” NYU Langone said in a statement. A colleague, Foram Raval, remembered her simply: “She was such a positive nurse… always smiles, even in worst situation.” As of this writing, police have identified the car — a Cadillac sedan registered with Pennsylvania plates — but not the driver. No arrest has been made.
- 28 — Jiayi Zheng's age; a medical-surgical nurse at NYU Langone Hospital–Brooklyn · Source: ABC7 New York, CBS News New York
- 96% — the share of NYC drivers who flee a crash and face zero criminal consequences, per an analysis of NYC Open Data · Source: AEE Law
- 3.6% — the NYPD's 2023 arrest rate for injury-causing hit-and-runs citywide, down from 8.6% in 2018 · Source: AEE Law analysis of NYPD/Mayor's Management Report data
- 11 — pedestrians and cyclists killed on the 2-mile Third Avenue corridor under the BQE since 2014, including Zheng · Source: Transportation Alternatives, amNewYork
- 3rd term — Kings County DA Eric Gonzalez's current term, re-elected unopposed Nov. 4, 2025 · Source: amNewYork, Ballotpedia
Zheng lived six blocks from where she was struck and had walked the route home from her overnight shift countless times. Sunset Park’s Third Avenue runs beneath the elevated Brooklyn-Queens Expressway — six lanes of ground traffic under seven more lanes of highway overhead — and functions, in practice, as a truck route with a crosswalk painted on top of it. State Sen. Andrew Gounardes (D), whose district covers Sunset Park, said he was “once again calling on NYC DOT to work with the community to make 3rd Ave. safer,” a sentence he has now had occasion to say more than once. Ben Furnas, executive director of Transportation Alternatives, put it more bluntly: “We are heartbroken and outraged that another New Yorker has been killed while crossing the street on Third Avenue in Sunset Park.”
Nurse leaving night shift killed in Brooklyn hit-and-run
A pedestrian was critically injured this morning crossing 3rd Avenue at 55th Street in Sunset Park. The vehicle was speeding, ran a red light, and did not stop.
Zheng is not the first NYU Langone nurse this corridor has killed. In October 2020, Clara Kang, 31, another NYU Langone nurse, was struck and killed by a motorcyclist while biking home from her own overnight shift at Third Avenue and 56th Street — one block from where Zheng died. In July 2025, a BMW driver ran a red light four blocks north at Third Avenue and 52nd Street and killed two men, Kexun Chen, 80, and Faqiu Lin, 59, in the crosswalk, then fled. Since 2014, Transportation Alternatives counts 11 pedestrians and cyclists killed walking or biking this two-mile stretch. Since 2018 alone, the group counts roughly 80 people killed or seriously injured along the corridor — a serious, life-altering crash averaging once a month for seven and a half years.
None of this was unknown or unaddressed on paper. In late 2023, the city’s Department of Transportation unveiled a redesign for more than 40 blocks of Third Avenue — a road diet cutting a travel lane in each direction, a parking-protected bike lane, and pedestrian islands to shorten crossings. Brooklyn Community Board 7 endorsed it in 2024. The Adams administration shelved it that same year after the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce, led by CEO Randy Peers, objected. Three days before Zheng was killed, the Mamdani administration’s new $4 billion Brooklyn-Queens Expressway plan promised, in passing, “a traffic safety redesign of Third Avenue in Sunset Park” — tied to a BQE reconstruction project that, on the timeline the city itself has floated, does not break ground until 2030.
Brooklyn’s hit-and-run prosecutions run through one office: District Attorney Eric Gonzalez (D), in office since 2017 and re-elected unopposed to a third term on November 4, 2025. Gonzalez’s early record on fatal hit-and-runs drew sustained local criticism. Streetsblog documented a run of lenient plea deals in his first two years: driver Joseph Zayats, who fled after killing 64-year-old Krystyna Iwanowicz with his SUV, received probation and a $500 fine; Brian Young, convicted of killing 28-year-old Francis Perez, got six months in jail; a garbage-truck driver who killed 27-year-old Neftaly Ramirez faced no criminal charges at all.
“We wait until someone dies. We wait until a tragedy.”
State Sen. Andrew Gounardes (D), on Third Avenue's crash record
The office’s record has since toughened, at least on paper. In 2026 alone, Gonzalez’s office announced five-to-ten-year sentences for drivers who fled fatal crashes in Bedford-Stuyvesant and Bushwick, a three-to-six-year sentence in Cypress Hills for a driver who killed a cyclist, and a murder indictment — not manslaughter, murder — against the Staten Island driver charged in the July 2025 Third Avenue double fatality four blocks from where Zheng died. But the same office secured only one-and-a-third to four years for the driver who killed an off-duty NYPD officer on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in 2025 — a reminder that even the tougher-sounding Gonzalez record is uneven case to case.
Every one of those Gonzalez sentences shares one thing: police caught the driver. That is the exception, not the rule. New York City records roughly 46,000 hit-and-run incidents a year. Citywide, the NYPD’s arrest rate for injury-causing hit-and-runs has collapsed from 8.6% in 2018 to 3.6% in 2023 — meaning more than 96 of every 100 drivers who flee a crash they injured or killed someone in face no criminal charge whatsoever, according to an analysis of NYC Open Data and the city’s own Mayor’s Management Report. Even in fatal cases, where investigators devote the most resources, drivers are identified only about half the time. A decade earlier, a Gothamist review of NYPD data found the department made arrests in roughly a third of fatal hit-and-runs and just 8% of all hit-and-run crashes citywide — the current numbers are a further decline, not an aberration.
Zheng’s case sits on the wrong side of that math. NYPD’s Highway District Collision Investigation Squad has the make, model, and state of the license plate on the car that killed her. As of publication, it does not have a driver — and without one, District Attorney Gonzalez’s office, tougher record or not, has no defendant to charge.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) took office in January 2026 promising to build on the city’s Vision Zero program. His administration announced that the first half of 2026 was among the safest six-month stretches on record for pedestrians — even as traffic crashes killed 99 New Yorkers in that same window, cyclist deaths rose 86% year over year (13 versus seven), and child traffic deaths rose 50%. Nine months into his term, Mamdani’s administration had not released the citywide Vision Zero plan that traditionally opens a new mayoralty. “An 86% increase in cyclist fatalities and a 50% increase in child fatalities should be a wake-up call for all of us,” City Council Member Shahana Hanif said in July. NYC DOT’s public position is that “no New Yorker should fear walking to school, biking to work, or driving to visit a loved one” — a standard Third Avenue in Sunset Park has failed, on the department’s own numbers, once a month for seven and a half years.
Mayor: Zohran Mamdani (D) — sworn in January 2026; his administration has not released a citywide Vision Zero plan or a funded timeline for the stalled Third Avenue redesign.
Kings County District Attorney: Eric Gonzalez (D) — in office since 2017, re-elected unopposed to a third term Nov. 4, 2025; his office's hit-and-run sentencing has toughened since a widely-criticized run of lenient 2017-18 plea deals, but can only prosecute drivers police actually identify.
NYPD Commissioner: Jessica Tisch — oversees the Highway District Collision Investigation Squad now searching for Zheng's driver, amid a citywide hit-and-run arrest rate that has fallen to 3.6%.
State Senator, Sunset Park: Andrew Gounardes (D) — has repeatedly pressed DOT for a Third Avenue redesign after prior corridor deaths.
Nothing here required a change in law. The DOT redesign has existed in drawer form since 2023. The DA’s tougher sentencing since 2026 shows what happens when police actually make an arrest. What Sunset Park has lacked isn’t a plan or a prosecutor willing to use it — it is the enforcement, staffing, and political will to make either one matter before the next nurse crosses Third Avenue.
Jiayi Zheng did everything right — she waited for the light, stayed in the crosswalk, wore the same scrubs she’d worn all night treating other people’s emergencies — and a driver who ran a red light killed her a block from her own hospital anyway. Brooklyn’s district attorney has gotten measurably tougher on the hit-and-run drivers his office actually gets to charge. That record means nothing here, because in 96 of every 100 New York City hit-and-run cases, nobody is ever caught at all. Until Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) funds the redesign his own department drew up three years ago and the NYPD reverses an arrest rate that has been falling for the better part of a decade, District Attorney Eric Gonzalez (D) will keep announcing five-to-ten-year sentences for the rare driver police manage to find — while Third Avenue keeps killing, on schedule, about once a month.
