Teen Cyclist Killed By Dump Truck Driver In Long Island City

LONG ISLAND CITY, QUEENS — A teen cyclist was killed by a garbage truck driver in Long Island City this weekend, the 21st death in what has become a strikingly bloody year for New Yorkers riding bikes on city streets.

Mario Valenzuela, 14, was riding his bike east on Borden Avenue about 2 p.m. Saturday when the 33-year-old sanitation truck driver started turning right onto 11th Street and slammed into the teen, according to police and media reports.

As the driver turned, the teen fell under the dump truck's rear tires, the New York Daily News reported.

Valenzuela, an Astoria resident, died on the scene. There are no arrests.

The teen's death brought to 21 the number of cyclists who have died on city streets so far this year. There were 10 cyclist deaths in all of 2018, according to data from the NYC Department of Transportation.

"Like so many of the 21 other cyclists dead this year, Mario was killed on a street with no protected bike lane," Transportation Alternatives Deputy Director Ellen McDermott said in a statement. "Without a network of protected bike lanes, New York cyclists will continue to suffer preventable deaths."

Valenzuela is the second cyclist killed on Borden Avenue this year.

In March, Long Island City resident Robert Spencer was killed in a crash just three blocks west from where Valenzuela was hit.

Spencer died weeks after concerned residents had demanded a two-way protected bike path along that stretch of Borden Avenue, an initiative City Council Member Jimmy Van Bramer has backed.

After that crash, DOT officials declined to answer Patch's questions on whether there are plans to install a protected bike lane along Borden or if the agency decided against it.

Locals had requested a bike lane along Borden from the waterfront to Vernon Boulevard, but that wouldn't have included the spot under the Pulaski Bridge where Valenzuela was killed.

"I had contacted NYC DOT before Robert Spencer was killed on Borden Avenue in March and then again afterward to plead for action. Now a very young man is dead," Van Bramer said in a statement. "When will NYC DOT start treating this like the emergency it is?"

The city's commercial trash haulers have a record of dangerous driving that has gone largely unchecked, a 2018 ProPublica investigation found.

Truck drivers for the city's top 20 private sanitation companies were involved in 73 serious crashes — five of which were fatal — from 2016 to 2018, according to the city comptroller's office.

The dump truck driver involved in Valenzuela's fatal crash worked for Limited Interior Group, according to the New York Post.