Driver Arrested After Fatal 2022 UES Crash: Police

UPPER EAST SIDE, NY — It's been nearly a year since a 66-year-old Upper East Side man died after a driver in a Toyota pickup truck slammed into him, but police say they have now arrested and charged the man behind the wheel.

Brooklyn resident Joshua Seals, 35, was arrested and charged Wednesday with failure to yield to a pedestrian and failure to exercise due care in the fatal May 2022 collision, officials said.

On May 3, 2022, William Maeder, 66, was crossing East 77th Street at First Avenue just before 6 p.m. when the driver of a 2007 Toyota Tacoma pickup truck made a left turn from First Avenue onto East 77th Street and slammed into him, police said at the time.

Maeder, whose East 72nd Street home was just blocks away, died the next day at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center.

Despite remaining at the scene, it took police 345 days to arrest and charge Seals in connection to the crash.

Police officials did not respond when asked why the arrest took place nearly a year after Maeder's death.

According to pictures published by Upper East Site, the truck's height appears to have been raised in an aftermarket conversion, giving the more than one-and-a-half ton truck an even more deadly result in pedestrian collisions.

Public vehicle violations show that Seals' truck racked up over 48 violations since August 2018, and has been charged nearly $3,300 in fines.

Prior to last May's collision, Seals had 14 moving violations — all school zone speed camera violations in Manhattan and Brooklyn.

After the fatal crash, Seals racked up three more moving violations in Brooklyn, Queens and The Bronx, plus another $546 in fines.

In 2022, there were 387 vehicle crashes in the Upper East Side, resulting in 516 injuries and six deaths, according to city data. That's a drop from the same period a year earlier, when there were 466 crashes, nearly 600 injuries and seven deaths.

The number of fatal crashes in the neighborhood hasn't been this high since 2018: only two people died in crashes in both 2019 and 2020.