Only stronger penalties will stop slaughter of pedestrians

On March 9, 2015, an unmarked Ford Crown Victoria, driven by a detective sergeant for the Bergen County Prosecutor's Office, struck and fatally injured Hue Dang, 64, a Vietnamese-American woman who was carrying plastic grocery bags as she walked toward her Hackensack apartment a couple of blocks away from this intersection.

Hackensack police filed no charges against the driver, John Straniero of Wayne, even though their official report showed Dang was struck when she was walking in or near the crosswalk on Jackson Avenue and Kennedy Street, not far from Route 80.

On the evening of the accident, the woman's blood stained the pavement, above. She died on the way to the hospital. Nearly a year later, the Union County Prosecutor's Office continues to investigate. As for Straniero, 49, he retired last Nov. 1, apparently to protect his pension in the event any charges are filed against him. Dang's relatives have filed a notice they will be naming him in a wrongful death suit.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

Editor Deirdre Sykes of The Record is really milking the death of two teens mowed down by an out-of-control car for all its worth today.

Page 1 carries a heart-tugging headline:

Inseparable friends,

unspeakable agony

And right under the big, black type is a photo of the grief-stricken mother, her mouth open in a heart-wrenching wail.

The crash Saturday night in North Bergen occurred roughly 2 miles from where a 7-year-old girl "lost her life" in a hit-run crash in West New York, The Record says (A-1).

The car that killed two 17-year-olds, Noel Herrera  of Cliffside Park and his best friend, Bryan Rodriguez of Union City, "plowed into them after jumping a curb ... and ripping through a metal fence."

Although three reporters worked on the story, it is missing any detail of whether the driver was speeding, racing another car or collided with another vehicle -- typical of The Record's pathetically poor accident reporting.

Nor can readers expect the editors of the Woodland Park daily to call for stiffer penalties against drivers in pedestrian deaths, likely the only way to cut down on the slaughter nearly six years after a revised crosswalk law took effect.

Driver doing 74 mph

Today, NorthJersey.com reports the unnamed driver charged in the deaths of the two teens "may have been traveling 74 miles an hour," nearly three times the speed limit.

Staff Writer John Cichowski has reported on the revised crosswalk law and pedestrian deaths in many of his Road Warrior columns.

But he also has quoted drivers saying they'd like to run down jaywalkers.

He's demonized red-light cameras, which deter speeders who run lights and injure or kill others, and virtually ignored stop-sign runners.

Sloppy reporting

The Record's stories on pedestrian deaths often omit whether a pedestrian was walking in a crosswalk when hit or even if there is a crosswalk at the intersection.

That was the case with Staff Writer Stefanie Dazio's March 11, 2015, story on the death of Hue Dang, 64, who was struck and fatally injured two days earlier at Jackson Avenue and Kennedy Street in Hackensack.

The crosswalk was never mentioned, but a police captain was quoted as saying, "It's unclear where Dang was standing" when she was struck.

That was the first and last story about the Vietnamese-American woman's death at the hands of a detective sergeant for the Bergen County Prosecutor's Office.

Sloppy editing

Sykes, who was in charge of the local-news section at the time, completely missed the lack of reporting on whether Dang was in or near the crosswalk when she was run down by John Straniero.

And the paper never did a follow-up, even when the investigation was transferred to the Union County Prosecutor's Office or when the detective retired last Nov. 1.

Sykes, Cichowski and other newsroom staffers at The Record treated the Vietnamese-American woman, who once worked as a supermarket cashier, as if she was so much road kill.

A second look at correction

Image via Wikipedia

The Bergen County Courthouse in Hackensack.

I took a second look at the correction that ran on Page A-2 on Saturday, as well as the headline and story that ran on L-1 on Friday. 

It appears that Staff Writer Jean Rimbach and head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes, the presumed editor of her story, contributed to the error in the headline through poor writing and editing, and a misplaced emphasis high up in the story on the Bergen County Prosecutor's Office.


Here's my revised commentary, which is also in the original post, Why this blast from the past?

'We goofed again'

Page A-2 brings two corrections, one from Better Living, which seems to get dates, telephone numbers and other basic information wrong almost every day. 

An L-1 headline on a lawsuit story by Jean Rimbach, one of the paper's investigative reporters, also was wrong Friday -- really wrong. 

The original headline says, "Papers sealed in suit alleging coverup by prosecutor." To be fair to the news copy desk, the story mentions a prosecutor's office -- "apparently the one in Bergen County" -- a number of times, and includes the Bergen prosecutor's name. 

The correction says, "The headline should have said that the suit alleges a coverup by the investigator's bosses in the state criminal justice system," even though that isn't clear from the story. 

The reporter worked on this sensitive story how long -- weeks or months? Did  Sykes edit it before it was sent over to the copy desk for a headline, and did she order the desk not to alter a word or challenge any vagueness, as she has done so many times in the past?