A bright spring afternoon in Bayside almost turned horrific when an unidentified man lost control of a late model Nissan sedan on Bell Boulevard and accelerated into southbound traffic, careened off an SUV and rammed a parked car on the Long Island Rail Road overpass.
The chain-reaction crash occurred on Friday, April 24, just feet from the stairways to the Bayside station, where early commuters from Penn Station were making their “weekend getaway” just minutes before.
“I tried to stop, but he hit me anyway,” said Greg Weisburch, 41, of Port Washington, the driver of the Ford SUV. “You could see in his face he was having a seizure.”
Weisburch, a volunteer firefighter with the Manhasset-Lakeville fire company in Manhasset, responded to his training, acting more like an emergency responder than an accident victim.
“His tires were still spinning on the pavement after he hit the parked car,” he told The Queens Courier. “I reached into his car and put it into park.”
Within moments, police and fire units responded to the scene, as did an ambulance from Flushing Hospital Medical Center. Emergency personnel extracted the driver, a young, blond male, after placing him on a body-board.
Officers at the scene said the driver was being transported to New York Hospital Queens, at Main Street and Booth Memorial Avenue in Flushing.
All the while, the driver of the parked car, Kenneth Spencer of Flushing stood by with his companion, thankful that they weren’t in the car when it was hit. “That’s the last thing I need,” he sighed.