Jiayi Zheng, a 28-year-old nurse at NYU Langone Hospital-Brooklyn, was killed Saturday morning after a driver struck her as she crossed 55th Street and Third Avenue in Sunset Park and fled. Police said she had just finished an overnight shift and was hit shortly before 7:40 a.m.
Investigators said a black Cadillac traveling southbound on Third Avenue struck Zheng, who suffered severe body trauma and was rushed to NYU Langone Hospital, where she later died. By Sunday, the driver remained at large and no arrests had been announced. That left her family, co-workers and the hospital community with the worst possible answer and no accountability yet attached to the crash.
NYU Langone Hospital-Brooklyn said it was deeply saddened by Zheng’s death and called it a tragic loss for her family, loved ones and colleagues. The hospital added that its nurses play an essential role in caring for others with compassion and dedication, and said the loss is being felt across the entire community. State Sen. Andrew Gounardes identified Zheng, whose death drew immediate attention because she was headed home after working through the night.
The killing also landed on a corridor advocates have warned about for years. Transportation Alternatives said Zheng’s death was the 11th fatality involving a pedestrian or cyclist on the two-mile section of Third Avenue beneath the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway since 2014, with six pedestrians and five cyclists among the dead. The group said another nurse at NYU Langone Hospital-Brooklyn was killed in 2020 while biking home from an overnight shift near Third Avenue and 56th Street, and it noted that a city proposal to redesign the corridor had still not been implemented.
What makes the case sharper is that the crash was caught on camera, yet the driver still disappeared. Transportation Alternatives said nine people have been killed in hit-and-run crashes across New York City in the last two weeks, a pace that turns this death from a single tragedy into part of a broader failure on the city’s streets. For now, the unanswered question is not what happened to Zheng. It is whether police will identify the person who hit her before another family is forced to wait for the same answer.
