A Brooklyn hit-and-run driver who killed a 71-year-old pedestrian and injured the victim’s daughter as he fled cops two months ago has been nabbed, police said Tuesday.
Robert Matthews, 26, was arrested Monday on a raft of charges, including manslaughter, criminally negligent homicide, fleeing a police officer and leaving the scene of a fatal crash.
Police say Matthews was behind the wheel of the Mazda CX that fatally struck Juanita Vidal and seriously injured her daughter, Jessica Vidal, 44, at Eldert St. and Knickerbocker Ave. in Bushwick. on May 9. Vidal was running an errand for her 17-year-old grandson’s birthday when she was run down.
“A police car was following him with lights and sirens,” witness Sandra Villman, 56, told the Daily News. “The impact was like a boom, like an explosion, and I realized the car hit two people.”
Police said the officers had tried to pull over Matthews for a traffic infraction but that he sped off, running two stop signs before the fatal collision, then striking an unoccupied parked car.
The Mazda driver ran off into the Halsey St. subway stop for the L train.
Juanita Vidal was taken by medics to Wyckoff Heights Medical Center but could not be saved. Her daughter, who suffered a ruptured lung and seven broken ribs, was rushed in critical condition to Elmhurst Hospital and is recovering.
“We tried to cross the street and we realized the car wasn’t stopping at the stop sign so we tried to go back or forward,” the daughter told the Daily News, wincing in pain from her hospital bed shortly after her mom was killed “It was so fast. It was like we got shocked.”
“We got struck,” she added. “After that all I remember is me on the floor and a bunch of people around me. That’s all I remember,”
Police said Matthews, who lives in East New York, has five prior arrests. Records show he was conditionally released by parole last October after serving more than a year for a weapons possession conviction.
