NEW YORK — A drunken driver who fatally mowed down four people at a Manhattan July 4 celebration would have kept driving if not for the bodies jammed under his car, prosecutors said Monday.
A boozed-up Daniel Christopher Hyden, 44, was kicked out of a local watering hole shortly before he got behind the wheel of his Ford F-150 and crashed through a fence at a Lower East Side park, plowing into a party there, Assistant District Attorney Matthew Bogdanos said in a chilling opening statement at the suspect’s non-jury trial.
“When he hits 11 people, he’s still revving the engine,” Bogdanos said. “The only reason the car stops, horrifically, is because it’s on human beings.
“Human beings are preventing the tires from touching the ground.”
Hyden plowed into the crowd going 52 mph, killing the four people and injuring another seven in the horror, authorities said.
He allegedly had a blood-alcohol content of up to .17 — more than twice the legal limit, officials said.
Bogdanos indicated that the prosecution plans to use Hyden’s own words against him at trial, citing passages during opening statements from the suspect’s autobiography, “The Sober Addict,” which details his rock-bottom struggles with substance abuse.
“’A real danger to others, my bike and myself when I was on the road intoxicated,’” Hyden wrote in a passage that Bogdanos quoted during his opening.
The prosecutor added of Hyden, “He was aware of and consciously ignored the risk — that another person’s death would occur from his driving while intoxicated.’’
The drunken wreck killed Emily Ruiz, 30, Herman Pinkney, 38, Ana Morel, 43, and Lucille Pinkney, 59, all of whom were celebrating the patriotic holiday at Corlears Hook Park.
In one particularly heartbreaking detail, Ruiz’s young son brought his toy first aid kit to the hospital “to help the doctors treat his mom’s fatal injuries,’’ Bogdanos revealed.
Hyden’s lawyer, Theodore Herlich, questioned his client’s blood-alcohol level — and contended he was hampered by a foot he injured in a fight at the club before the crash, “which could have played a role in why the brakes were not pressed harder.”
By KYLE SCHNITZER and JORGE FITZ-GIBBON/New York Post
