Astoria mourns child killed by driver
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A memorial was held for Dolma Naadhun, a 7-year-old killed by a driver in Astoria earlier this month, on Sunday, Feb. 26, 2023. Eagle photo by Jacob Kaye
By Jacob Kaye
Astoria Heights Playground was crowded on Sunday. Children ate snacks, carried balloons and covered the ground in chalk art. The whole affair could have been mistaken for a birthday party were it not the somber faces of the adults and the memorial for an Astoria girl in the center of it all.
Local families and officials were gathered in the park to remember Dolma Naadhun, the 7-year-old who was killed after being hit by a driver at the intersection of 45th Street and Newtown Road a little more than a week ago.
Naadhun was a mainstay at the playground, her parents said. The park is located only a few blocks away from where she died.
“I’m happy that they came out to support,” said Tsering Wangdu, Naadhun’s father. “In the park, we are like a family.”
Naadhun’s name was scattered throughout the playground, written in chalk and often accompanied by a heart drawn around it. Inside a circular garden, not quite withered by the mild winter, a photo of the girl was draped in white cloth, surrounded by purple balloons, flowers, cards from her friends and a stuffed animal.
“She was a firecracker in the park,” said Kelly O’Connell, a gardener with the city’s Parks Department who organized the memorial. “Everyone knew her.”
Local families gathered in an Astoria park in memory of Dolma Naadhun, a local 7-year-old girl who was killed by a driver in the neighborhood a week ago. Eagle photo by Jacob Kaye
Naadhun was crossing Newtown Road in the early evening on Feb. 17 with her mother, when a driver rolled through a stop sign, hitting the girl. Naadhun was taken to Elmhurst Hospital, where she was later pronounced dead.
The 46-year-old woman driving the car was not licensed and was operating the vehicle with a learner’s permit and without a licensed adult inside the car, according to the Department of Transportation.
The crash happened just before the start of Losar, the Tibetan New Year, which Naadhun’s family, who are Buddhists, was preparing to celebrate. The family’s temple instead spent the week mourning one of their youngest members.
“She was just an angel,” her father said. “I don’t know any other words for it.”
On Sunday, Wangdu and his wife were joined by City Councilmembers Julie Won and Tiffany Cabán, State Senator Michael Gianaris and Assemblymember Jessica González-Rojas to demand the Department of Transportation install a traffic light at the intersection currently regulated by a four-way stop sign.
“I don't want this to happen to any family, I just want the Department of Transportation to set up the red light,” Wangdu told the Eagle. “If not, whatever I need to do, I'm going to do that. I don't want this to happen to any other parents.”
A spokesperson for the DOT said that the agency has no immediate plans to install a traffic light at the intersection. Instead, the agency is planning to ban parking nearest to the intersection – a practice called “daylighting” – to create better visibility for pedestrians, cyclists and drivers.
The spokesperson noted the intersection’s “low crash history” – five injuries have been recorded at the intersection dating back to 2018 prior to the death of the 7-year-old.
A memorial at the site where 7-year-old Dolma Naadhun was fatally struck by a driver earlier this month. Eagle photo by Jacob Kaye
But officials on Sunday said daylighting is not enough.
“We will not accept anything other than the traffic light,” Won said. “We do not want any more lives like Dolma sacrificed for what could have been a preventable death.”
Newtown Road runs at a slant through southeast Astoria. It serves as a shortcut to drivers heading east. It’s less than a mile long.
Some intersections along the street lack crosswalks, others don’t have crossing signs. Nearly every intersection along the road has visibility issues as a result of parked cars, dining structures or the natural slant of the street.
Dating back to 2012, there have been 198 crashes along Newtown or at one of its intersections, according to city data. That’s a rate of a crash every three weeks for the past 10 years. In those crashes, 57 people were injured and one – Naadhun – died.
When asked about making larger changes to the corridor, like creating a linear park or bike boulevard, elected officials said they didn’t want to distract from the family’s request for a traffic light. However, they noted that they’d be open to discussing large-scale reforms to the street.
“We're continuing to fight for those large corridors to be safe and re-envision what safety could look like and what the city can look like under a more visionary approach to public safety, street safety and green space,” González-Rojas said.
But at the heart of their outrage was what they said was the Department of Transportation’s “reactive” approach to street safety.
“The sad truth is that [Naadhun’s] death will make it more likely we get these lights,” Gianairs said. “The way that the DOT and the city looks at these things is – we wait for bad things to happen and then they decide to put a traffic light in place. It is literally what they do.”
“When we ask them to study intersections, they review the incidents and accidents that have already happened there, when a lot of times, the communities are telling them, ‘This is a dangerous intersection, do something before something like this happens,’” he added.
Rebecca Van Kessel, a mother who lives in the neighborhood, said that she and other parents in the neighborhood have long noted the dangers of the intersection and others nearby.
“We know that that corner is unsafe – we probably should have done something after the third accident at that corner, but unfortunately, I'm learning too late what it takes to make a corner safe and how many people have to get together and say, ‘We need to fix this,’” Van Kessel said.
“Department of Transportation, Eric Adams, you have the power to make it happen,” she added. “We are going to let you know what we want and we expect you to help us fix the corner.”
