Natalie Guzman

18 years young

Triple hit-and-run victim killed

Wednesday, January 21, 2004 Posted: 6:56 PM EST (2356 GMT)
copyright CNN

NEW YORK (AP) -- The black car hit her first, striking Natalie Guzman as she tried to cross a Queens street to buy a bag of potato chips. The 18-year-old managed to get to her feet before she was hit again, by a white car.

About four minutes later, her friends dove for cover as a black sport utility vehicle hurtled through the 30 mph zone at an estimated 80 mph. Guzman, who could not move, was killed instantly.

Police searched for the three hit-and-run drivers Wednesday in the kind of crime that tends to reinforce New Yorkers' reputation as a cold-hearted lot.

City Councilman Eric Gioia said the case reminded him of that of Kitty Genovese, who was killed on a Queens street in 1964 while dozens of people watched from their windows and did nothing.

"It shocks the conscience that three separate people would be so callous as to mow someone down and just keep on going," Gioia said.

Guzman's family contended that she was intentionally killed, saying she had feared for her life since a bar fight two weeks earlier.

"The family thinks her death may have something to do with that fight," said neighbor Olimpia Urena, who acted as a translator for Guzman's mother and aunt. The family came from the Dominican Republic.

Police said only that they are still investigating all possibilities and looking into whether the drivers even knew they had hit someone.

Guzman's life ended Sunday morning, shortly after she left Los Primos Tournament Billiards on Roosevelt Avenue in Corona, Queens, a heavily Hispanic neighborhood about two blocks from the one-bedroom apartment she shared with her 15-month-old daughter, Laritza, and her mother, Miriam Toribio. This stretch of Roosevelt Avenue is home to several bars and social clubs.

Urena said Guzman dropped out of high school after becoming pregnant but had recently decided to get her life back on track.

"She said she wanted to make her life normal, she wanted to do something with her life," Urena said. "She was studying to get her GED and after that, she planned to go to LaGuardia Community College."

Guzman even had a job interview to sell cosmetics lined up this week, Urena added.

"She was a very friendly girl, very helpful," Urena said. "If she saw me with my shopping bags, she would always help me. She didn't deserve what happened to her."

A witness told police that Guzman had left the pool hall to go to a bodega across the street.

The first car, traveling at about 60 to 70 mph, struck Guzman as she attempted to cross the two-lane street, which runs underneath the elevated subway tracks and has cars parked along the sides of the road, the witness said.

The second car was also going about 60 to 70 mph, the witness said.

As Guzman lay in the street, her friends discovered her and tried to help. They told police they believed she was still breathing. Then the SUV came barreling toward them.

Urena said Guzman's family finds it hard to believe that three people could run over her, and none of them would stop.

By Corey Kilgannon and Michael Wilson
Published: January 21, 2004
Copyright New York Times

The police report Sunday was grim enough: an 18-year-old Queens woman crossing the street had been hit twice by speeding vehicles and killed. Neither of the vehicles had stopped. In its grief, the woman's family said publicly that there was only one way it could have happened - she had been murdered, deliberately run over by the same homicidal driver twice.

Yesterday, the police discounted that theory but in so doing revealed an even more startling series of events: The woman, Natalie Guzman, had been hit not twice, but three times by separate cars, each speeding away after striking her, the drivers either unaware of what they had done or unwilling to stop and help.

In a city where lives can end with lightning randomness and in darkly unpredictable ways - just last week, a woman walking her dogs in the East Village was electrocuted by a metal plate in the street - the death of Ms. Guzman on Roosevelt Avenue near 111th Street gave pause to veteran law enforcement officials and those walking the busy streets of Corona, where Ms. Guzman had lived. Could it possibly be true that three drivers unknowingly struck a human being on an otherwise empty early morning street and then drove away?

"If the Police Department's theory is true, then this would be a level of human callousness and depravity not seen since the Kitty Genovese case," Councilman Eric Gioia of Queens said, referring to the 1964 murder of a Queens woman who was slain as 38 people watched from their windows and did nothing to assist her. "If it was a homicide, it would almost seem less unsettling than the thought that three people mowed someone down and just drove away."

Jose Jiminez, 44, a lumber salesman who works on Roosevelt Avenue in the largely Hispanic neighborhood, also expressed disbelief: "A three-way hit-and-run. Is that possible, even in New York?"

He shook his head as he contemplated it. "I don't think so," he said. "I mean, New Yorkers are cold, but we're not that cold."

The police do not believe that any of the vehicles deliberately struck Ms. Guzman. Their finding that three vehicles ran over the woman stems from an interview with a witness who was found during a canvass of the area on Monday. The police felt confident enough in this one witness's account to publicize the new version of events.

The first car, a black four-door sedan, hit Ms. Guzman as she crossed Roosevelt Avenue at 5:30 a.m. Sunday to buy a bag of potato chips across the street from the pool hall where she had spent the evening, according to the police. The witness told the police that the car could have been a livery cab. Ms. Guzman, the mother of a 15-month-old girl, managed to get up off the pavement one to two minutes after being hit but was then struck by the second car, a white four-door sedan, the police said.

The witness said both cars were traveling 60 to 70 miles per hour down Roosevelt Avenue, a two-way street under the elevated No. 7 train lined with heavy iron stanchions and many traffic lights.

About four minutes after the second impact, a group of Ms. Guzman's friends found her and tried to comfort her as she lay crumpled on the frozen roadbed. At this point, they believed that she had been hit once. She was alive and breathing, they told the police. But then a black sport utility vehicle came racing toward them - at 80 m.p.h., the witness estimated - and struck the woman as her friends dived for safety. She was killed instantly, the police said. Earlier witnesses told the police they believed that the S.U.V.'s headlights were off, but the new witness was unable to confirm that, the police said.

Ms. Guzman's face was so disfigured by the tires of the S.U.V. that city officials suggested her mother send a relative to identify the body. "I'm not going to be able to recognize my own daughter," Ms. Guzman's mother, Miriam Toribio, said yesterday at her home in Corona. Several relatives sat in chairs weeping.