Police have been caught in yet another rush to blame the cyclist victim of a fatal traffic crash, this time quietly amending a report that had initially blamed an electric bike rider for his own death so that the official record now points out that the rider was doing nothing wrong before he was hit and killed by the driver of a massive truck.
In the latest instance of police victim-blaming, the NYPD quietly amended the preliminary report of the Sept. 8 crash, when 62-year-old MD Abul Bashar was run over and killed by a private sanitation truck driver in Gowanus. Initially, cops said Bashar was “traveling north on the east sidewalk” on Third Avenue when he “did exit the sidewalk” and was struck by the driver of a Mack dump truck owned by a Brooklyn-based private carting firm.
But police later corrected themselves to say that Bashar, a delivery cyclist who worked for a nearby restaurant, was actually doing what he was supposed to be doing — riding on the street and traveling with a green light — when he was fatally run over by the truck at 12th Street. Bashar died from his injuries 10 days later.
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