U-Haul driver’s ‘violent rampage’ leaves 1 dead and 8 injured in NYC
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A man driving a U-Haul truck swerved onto sidewalks and plowed into cyclists and scooter riders in New York City on Monday, killing one person and injuring eight others, authorities say.
Officers responded to a report of a man driving a U-Haul truck in the Bay Ridge neighborhood, NYPD Commissioner Keechant Sewell said at a news conference. The vehicle struck multiple people before being stopped by police near the entrance to a tunnel leading from Brooklyn to Manhattan, Sewell said.
The driver’s arrest ended what Sewell called a “violent rampage.” “We have no indication that there is any terrorism involvement in this incident,” she said.
A 44-year-old man was killed after he suffered a head injury when he was hit by the truck roughly a half hour after it struck the first victim, the police department said in a statement.
The nine people struck by the vehicle ranged in age from 30 to 66. All were men. One of the injured people was a police officer.
The driver was later identified by his son as Weng Sor, 62, a troubled man with a history of harmful behavior and stints behind bars. Sor’s son, Stephen Sor, 30, told The Associated Press that his father had a history of mental illness and, until recently, was living in Las Vegas, where records show he was convicted and served time for multiple acts of violence, including stabbing his own brother.
“Very frequently he’ll choose to skip out on his medications and do something like this,” Stephen Sor said in an interview outside his Brooklyn home. “This isn’t the first time he’s been arrested. It’s not the first time he’s gone to jail.”
The destruction shattered the late-morning routine and immediately evoked memories of other vehicle assaults on bikers and pedestrians in the crowded city, including a terrorist’s deadly 2017 attack that killed eight people on a Manhattan bike path and a disturbed motorist’s rampage through Times Square the same year that killed one and injured 20.
The truck struck the first victim at 10:17 a.m., police said, and other reports followed as the vehicle moved through a busy section of Brooklyn, just north of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge along New York Harbor.
The neighborhood, a melting pot of immigrants from Europe, Asia and the Middle East, is known as the setting of “Saturday Night Fever,” and parts of TV’s “Blue Bloods.” Each fall, it hosts a leg of the New York City Marathon.
Contributing: The Associated Press
