Nassau County 'ignored' a dangerous intersection. Now it could be on the hook for tens of millions.

It was the afternoon of Halloween, and students were walking out of Elmont Memorial High School when two cars at the intersection collided.

One car accelerated and slammed head-on into a third. The other car careened onto the sidewalk and struck a utility pole, a tree and a group of students walking from school, among them two 10th graders: Natali Cruz and Sidney Garcon Jonathan.

That Oct. 31, 2018, crash left the girls, who were both 15 at the time, with severe, lifelong injuries. Earlier this year, a jury found Nassau County, in addition to the two drivers, was responsible for Cruz’s injuries — leaving the county facing a nearly $70 million jury verdict, reportedly among the largest in county history.

Jurors decided Nassau County was negligent because it failed to study or make safety improvements to Dutch Broadway, the county-owned road where the crash happened, despite a series of prior crashes and years of warnings. A separate trial involving Garcon Jonathan is scheduled to begin in November, meaning the county could have to pay millions more.

Experts say the case highlights how local governments’ failure to improve roadways — in a region with a disproportionate number of serious crashes — can leave taxpayers responsible for tens of millions of dollars in damage and legal bills.

And it raises concern about the effectiveness of Nassau County’s roadway improvement program, after an engineer for the county testified at trial that the county has a yearslong backlog for conducting traffic safety studies.

"It's a question of spend money now or spend money later," Michael Shenoda, a professor of traffic engineering at Farmingdale State University, said in an interview.

[The intersection] may be busy, but it's well-maintained.

— Vincent McNamara, attorney representing Nassau County

For years, advocates and lawmakers had called on the county to study whether changes to lane markings, turning rules, roadway width, speed signage or other elements could make the crossing safer. But officials conducted no formal safety study until after the 2018 crash.

"The tens of millions of dollars they could be on the hook for now would have been much better spent addressing some of the issues," Shenoda said.

The county, which is seeking to overturn the verdict, argued the roadway was safe and that the drivers were entirely to blame for the crash.

The intersection "may be busy, but it's well-maintained," attorney Vincent McNamara, representing Nassau, told jurors. "It's got cross-hatchings. It's got pedestrian signals. It's got a crossing guard."

‘Total shock’

Cruz and Garcon Jonathan were best friends who lived on the same street and walked to and from Elmont High most days.

Cruz was an athlete on the school’s lacrosse and soccer teams. Garcon Jonathan dreamed of becoming a writer and journalist.

Because of their brain injuries, neither remembers the crash, they testified. Traffic cameras and home surveillance video captured the moment the car plowed into them.

That afternoon, the girls had left the high school and were walking east on Dutch Broadway. Across the busy intersection, a black Acura driven by then 51-year-old Console Ifezulumba, a parent on her way to pick up her own children, attempted to pull out of the right-hand lane and collided with a silver Lexus driven by a woman, Carrie Morris, who was 91 at the time.

Dutch Broadway has no dedicated right-turn lane at that stoplight, and Ifezulumba was attempting to go around a car waiting for students who were crossing Elmont Road.

"All I heard was bam, like that, and you know, I was in total shock," Ifezulumba testified at the trial. "I was just screaming Jesus, Jesus."

Both cars were going relatively slowly at first, then accelerated. Morris crashed head-on into a car waiting at the stoplight, while Ifezulumba sped about 200 feet across the intersection, onto the sidewalk and into a tree, a utility pole and a group of students.

Ifezulumba’s attorneys argued at trial that she experienced "pedal confusion" — meaning she stepped on the gas pedal instead of the brake — after the first collision.

Attorneys for Ifezulumba did not respond to requests for comment. An attorney for the estate of Morris, who died in 2024, declined to comment. Police did not charge anyone in connection to the crash.

Nassau police said four students were injured, Cruz and Garcon Jonathan most critically. Cruz suffered a traumatic brain injury, with lasting effects on her cognition, balance, memory and emotions. Now 23, she is "at high risk of permanent unemployment" and will need lifelong medical care, according to medical records filed in court.

The county knew there was this dangerous condition there, and the county did absolutely nothing.

— Charles Wisell, attorney representing Natali Cruz

Garcon Jonathan, also 23, sustained a traumatic brain injury as well, in addition to multiple severe broken bones in her face, according to her attorneys. She testified at the trial that she is now a sociology major and works with children with disabilities.

And yet, "she has crushing, debilitating injuries," Peter Thomas, an attorney representing her, said in an interview.

The intersection

The crash was not the first time Dutch Broadway and Elmont Road had raised alarms.

The busy crossing, just east of the Queens-Nassau border, abuts Elmont Memorial High School, St. Boniface Catholic Church, a park, a funeral home and a Walgreens.

Documents filed with the court show that community members — including two police captains and a priest at St. Boniface — had been contacting county authorities as far back as 1977, expressing concerns about the two roads and asking for improvements.

Between 2015 and 2018, Nassau County officials recorded 107 crashes at the crossing, according to court records. In 2015 and 2016, a 12-year-old girl and a 19-year-old woman were hit and killed in the span of six months within a quarter-mile of the crossing, and a cyclist was killed at the intersection in 2012, according to a federal crash database.

"Maybe due to the fact that there are people traveling here from other communities, from Queens and Brooklyn, and they don't know the rules of the road — I don't know — or there's not enough education, or engineering, or enforcement," Nassau Legis. Carrié Solages, a Valley Stream Democrat, said of the intersection in an interview.

"But altogether, it was a dangerous road," he said.

In the three years before the 2018 crash, Solages wrote eight letters to the county’s department of public works, police and then-county executives Ed Mangano and Laura Curran requesting a study and safety improvements for Dutch Broadway and Elmont Road.

An attorney for Mangano, who is serving a federal prison sentence for an unrelated public corruption conviction, declined to comment. Curran, who took office 10 months before the crash, did not respond to a request for comment.

Charles Wisell, an attorney for Cruz, said in an interview Nassau "ignored" years of warnings about the roadway.

"The county knew there was this dangerous condition there, and the county did absolutely nothing," he said.

After the 2018 crash, the Town of Hempstead moved to lower the speed limit on Dutch Broadway near the high school from 30 mph to 20 mph, Newsday reported at the time.

But Nassau County did not complete a traffic study until 2020. It later implemented a number of safety improvements, including reducing lane widths, adding traffic and pedestrian signals, installing digital speed feedback signs and creating dedicated turning lanes.

As the county and town made those improvements, the intersection's crash rate, adjusted for traffic volume, trended downward. There were roughly half the number of crashes in 2024 as in 2018, according to state Department of Transportation data, though 2023 saw a spike.

Since 2020, the county legislature has approved at least $3.25 million for traffic safety improvements along Dutch Broadway. County officials did not respond to questions about how much was actually spent in the vicinity of the intersection where Cruz and Garcon Jonathan were injured.

Most of the changes were made along the two county roads leading up to the crash intersection, rather than at the crossing itself — a fact the county's attorneys have pointed to in arguing that engineering fixes could not have prevented the crash.

"We all live in Nassau County. It's not news to you," McNamara told jurors during the trial. "Any major intersection has a lot of accidents."

A yearslong backlog

The case has raised questions about how Nassau County handles complaints and concerns about roadways.

Harold Lutz, the county’s director of traffic engineering, testified that although Nassau had funds set aside for traffic studies, it did not conduct one at Elmont and Dutch Broadway before the crash because of a yearslong backlog for studies around the county.

The intersection’s history of crashes — 107 in three years — was not unusually high for a busy crossing, Lutz added.

State traffic data shows at least 20 other intersections involving county roads recorded more crashes than the Elmont crossing from 2016 through 2018, although those intersections may have had differing levels of vehicle and pedestrian traffic. 

Shenoda, the Farmingdale State University professor, told Newsday that given its proximity to the school and history of crashes, the Elmont crossing deserved more attention from authorities. 

"This intersection seemed like it was screaming for a study and some mitigation," he said.

At the time of the crash, the county faced a long waitlist of traffic safety complaints, as well as an acute lack of engineers and other public works staff to investigate them, Newsday reported in 2019.

At the time, Nassau officials said there were nearly 1,300 open complaints. County officials did not respond to questions about how many there are today.

But staffing concerns still persist. According to county payroll data, Nassau County’s department of public works had only five traffic engineers on staff in 2018. In 2025 it had eight, which is still less than the roughly 15 recommended by federal guidelines for a department its size, although many road departments nationwide fall short of the benchmarks, according to Peter Yauch, an engineer with the Washington-based Institute of Transportation Engineers.

While departments often contract private firms for traffic safety studies, as Nassau did in this case, county engineers are needed to conduct oversight, Shenoda said.

The county has paid out several multimillion-dollar settlements in cases alleging roadway safety flaws, including $8.4 million to a motorcyclist who was severely injured in a 2014 crash in Port Washington and $25 million to a woman who suffered a traumatic brain injury in a 2007 Oceanside crash.

Cruz’s lawsuit "is a classic negligence case," Benjamin Zipursky, a Fordham School of Law professor, said in an interview. "It's a problem that people have identified. A company or a government or something just didn't want to spend the money to fix it."

Jury awards $97 million 

After trial proceedings that spanned roughly a month this spring, the six-person jury ruled Ifezulumba, whose car struck the children, was 70% responsible for the crash. The county was 27% responsible and Morris, the other driver, was 3% responsible, jurors found.

In total, the jury awarded approximately $97 million to Cruz. According to the New York Law Journal, it was the largest verdict in the state in 2026 and the second-largest in Nassau County history.

Because the county bears at least some responsibility, it would be on the hook for the most money, about $68 million, while insurance carriers for the drivers would have to pay far less even though jurors found one of them more responsible.

The way state civil litigation law is written can leave government agencies, which have the most resources, to cover the majority of economic damages — such as medical costs and lost income — even when other parties are deemed more at fault. In this case, Nassau faces the largest bill because the drivers' insurance policies are limited, according to the plaintiffs' lawyers.

As for noneconomic damages — which includes the difficult-to-quantify pain and suffering — Nassau County, which was found to be 27% at fault for the crash, would be required to pay only 27% of those damages.

But any payments from the county may not come for some time. McNamara, the attorney representing Nassau, has asked the judge who heard the case to overturn the jury’s verdict, which is "absolutely beyond belief," McNamara said at a hearing earlier this month.

New York Supreme Court Justice Leonard Steinman has not yet ruled on that request. But if he declines, the county could appeal to a state appellate court, further prolonging the case.

Meanwhile, the case of Garcon Jonathan is scheduled for trial in late November.

Crucially, that trial is only concerned with damages: Because the liability for the crash was already decided, the only thing left to determine is how much Garcon Jonathan is owed by the county and the other drivers. Thomas, her lawyer, said he expects another multimillion-dollar verdict.

"We're going to get a verdict for full value," he said.

Newsday's Arielle Martinez contributed to this story.