Amy Cohen’s life as a parent took a horrifying turn in 2013, when her 12-year-old son Sammy was fatally struck by a van as he crossed a street near their Park Slope home. In the years since, she’s channeled her never-ending grief into activism, launching a pedestrian safety group in 2014 to safeguard other New Yorkers. Last week, Cohen, 58, led nearly 100 other activists at a rally in Albany to demand action on proposed traffic safety bills, including legislation known as “Sammy’s Law” in honor of her late son.
Here, she shares her story with Joshua Rhett Miller:
On the morning of Tuesday, October 8, 2013, I kissed Sammy and his then-15-year-old sister, Tamar, goodbye before they headed off to school and my husband and I went to work in Manhattan. It was the last time I’d see my precious son alive.
He and his sister were inseparable. In a classic New York way, they shared a room for way too long because we have a two-bedroom apartment and they didn’t want to move. They loved spending time together so much that when we divided the room into two, they were almost sad. They later discovered they could talk through a vent near their beds between the two rooms and they’d chat all night.
Just a few days prior, Sammy and I had a little fight.
He was really driven, really smart and always wanted to go a good high school. He got miffed that weekend when I forced him to join me while visiting an old friend in New Jersey. I wanted to have a family day, but he wanted to stay home and study for the Specialized High School Admissions Test. He was mad at me and held a grudge for like 24 hours.
We rarely argued, but looking back, I’m almost glad we did. We had made up that morning with a big hug. I just loved getting his hugs and miss them so much.
After work, I went to Tamar’s open-house at her school on the Upper West Side. I wasn’t looking at my phone for a while, and then I looked down and saw I had over 20 messages — from the police, from my husband Gary, from an old boss whose number happened to be in Sammy’s phone. When I finally reached Gary, he told me to get to Methodist Hospital in Brooklyn as fast as possible, that Sammy “had been hit.”
The most harrowing images raced through my mind as I got into a taxi. It was rush-hour and took way too long to get anywhere. I was frantically calling everyone from the taxi — our pediatrician and my sister, who is a doctor.
Sammy was a smart, street-savvy, careful kid. He went to M.S. 51 in Park Slope, which is just a few blocks from our home. That afternoon, he’d come home and grabbed a snack, studied a little bit and went to meet a friend across the street before soccer practice in Prospect Park.
As he waited, kicking around the ball to warm up, it went into the street. Sammy stopped at first, not entering the two-lane, one-way road – Prospect Park West. Then the car in the left lane stopped and motioned for Sammy to cross. As he did so, a van passed that car in the right lane, speeding at least 30 mph in a busy residential area to make the light.
By the time I got to the hospital, Sammy was already in surgery. The next time I saw him, he was dead. He held on for five hours as doctors tried save him, but ultimately his body just couldn’t withstand being run over by a multi-ton vehicle.
I was too devastated to plan Sammy’s funeral; I really couldn’t do anything. My sister and brother-in-law handled arrangements for the ceremony at a synagogue in Park Slope, where it was standing-room-only, with about 1,000 people showing up.
I remember we got a call the evening before that they were expecting too many people, so it had to be moved to another location nearby. I didn’t even think I was going to speak, but that morning, I woke up and wrote down some thoughts about Sammy, including how we joked that he and Tamar were so close that he never had to speak when he was little because she always knew what he wanted.
You cannot understand the depths of the pain and the impact his death has on each member of our family. It’s truly devastating
No charges were filed against the driver that hit Sammy, a 24-year-old construction worker named Luis Quizhpi-Tacuri. He wasn’t even licensed to drive in New York. A Department of Motor Vehicles judge later suspended his driving privileges for six months for failure to exercise caution and passing unsafely on the right.
I never really thought about whether he deserved to be punished more harshly. The crisis of pedestrian deaths in the city is not going to change by penalizing one driver at a time. He was obviously driving recklessly, but I’m sure Luis is struggling, too. I’m not sure I could live with myself if I killed somebody.
I’ve focused my energies on making the city less dangerous for other residents, especially children. Months after Sammy’s death, I cofounded Families for Safe Streets in partnership with New York-based nonprofit Transportation Alternatives to prevent more unnecessary devastation.
We intentionally do not call them accidents because elected officials have not put in place solutions to save lives and end the crisis on our roadways. The United States fares abysmally in pedestrian safety and traffic fatalities compared to every other industrialized nation – we’re at the bottom of the West and four times as dangerous per capita as all of Europe, Australia and Japan, and twice as dangerous as Canada. It does not have to be this way.
For the past four years I’ve been trying to pass Sammy’s Law. It would give New York City control over its speed limits, so it could lower the threshold to 20 mph in residential areas. It’s a simple, safe measure that has been instituted in other municipalities. There’s no reason it should take this long to pass.
Nothing will bring back my Sammy. If he were still alive today, he’d be the bright, kind and inquisitive young man he aspired to become, someone who was curious about the world while improving it any way he could.
In his memory, I’m doing all I can to make the make the city safer for other children — and to spare other parents this monumental pain.
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