A Richmond Hill seventh-grader died last week, 13 days after being struck by a car outside J.H.S. 210. Last September, the city said the school was surrounded by dangerous roadways and intersections.Elvis Quinn was walking to J.H.S. 210, also known as the Elizabeth Blackwell School, on April 13 when a car hit him at the intersection of 101st Avenue and 94th Street, less than 50 yards from the school. According to a police spokesman, no charges were pressed against the driver, who was trying to get through a yellow light.
Though the 12-year-old was suffering from internal bleeding and his lung nearly collapsed, family members were hopeful when he was discharged from Manhattan’s Weill Cornell Medical Center early last week. He watched the Mets game at home on the night of Tuesday, May 1, and was in good spirits, wearing his David Wright jersey, according to his cousin.
But when his mother, Carina Quinn, tried to wake him up the following morning, he did not respond. Family members said that he was declared dead soon after, but would not elaborate on the exact cause of death.
“I can’t comprehend the amount of pain. It’s like losing part of yourself,” said Juan Rodriguez, a Richmond Hill High School student and friend of the Quinn family. He said that the family remains in complete shock over the loss of Quinn, a baseball fanatic who also loved dancing and video games.
While Quinn’s death elicited similar dismay from other members of the J.H.S. 210 community, accidents around the school are frequent. Between 2001 and 2004, 21 pedestrian accidents occurred in the Ozone Park school’s immediate vicinity and seven occurred between 1998 and 2000, according to the Department of Transportation. Between 1998 and 2000, eight vehicle-on-vehicle accidents occurred in the intersection where Quinn was struck.
Roughly 40 percent of the school’s 2,100 students walk to J.H.S. 210 each day, including the eighth-grade daughter of Glana Urebe. Urebe, who walks with her daughter daily, said that because of the history of accidents around the school: “You can’t let them go by themselves.”
In September, as a part of their Safe Routes to School initiative, the transportation department identified 135 public and private schools surrounded by roadways needing safety improvements. Because of the frequency of accidents around the Elizabeth Blackwell School it was one of 33 in Queens.
The RBA Group and URBITRAN Associates, the two groups that studied the area around the school, determined that intersection crossing times were adequate, but they recommended several short-term measures be taken to make the area safer. These included making cars stop farther from crosswalks then they were then required to, decreasing congestion by more clearly marking no parking zones, and bringing crossing guards to the area.
Craig Chin, a department spokesman, said that all of these short-term measures were implemented except the employment of crossing guards. He said that school administrators have to arrange for crossing guards with the NYPD.
Rosalyn Allman-Manning, the school’s principal, declined comment for this article, but several parents said that they have never seen a crossing guard at any intersection around the school.
As projects that would serve as longterm solutions, the report listed widening Woodhaven Boulevard’s island, moving crosswalk obstructions such as traffic signal poles, and extending curbs to shorten the walking distance for pedestrians. One intersection needing curb extensions, study authors wrote, was 94th Street and 101st Avenue, where Quinn was struck.
Chin said that the department was still planning these projects and that he could not estimate when work might begin.
David Quintana, the co-president of the school’s Parents Association, plans to reach out to Councilman Joseph Addabbo Jr. (D-Howard Beach) in his push to have the department implement all of the proposed solutions as soon as possible. “Every parent’s fear is that your kid gets hit by a car. Something needs to be done,” Quintana, the father of a J.H.S. 210 eighth-grader, said.
Other parents agree. Julio Cortes, the father of an Elizabeth Blackwell fifth-grader who sees students stream across the middle of 101st Avenue each day to get to a deli on the other side of the road, believes someone else is going to get hurt.
