Cops have arrested an unlicensed SUV operator who caused a chain-reaction crash that killed a 67-year-old man on a Brooklyn sidewalk, officials said Friday.
Brandon Hightower, 32, was charged Thursday with reckless driving and unlicensed operation of a vehicle, police said.
He was driving his Toyota Highlander on July 18 when he crashed into a Hyundai Palisade at St. Marks and Franklin avenues at about 3 p.m., police said.
The impact sent the Hyundai veering onto the sidewalk, where it slammed into Heriberto Morales, then hit a parked and unoccupied Honda Odyssey.
A firefighter who lives nearby ran to the scene and performed CPR on Morales. Medics rushed Morales to Kings County Hospital, but he could not be saved.
“I was praying he did (survive) and now I’m devastated. It’s tragic,” a witness, Lakeysha Smith, 51, said at the time. “I seen him in the ambulance. He lifted one arm up…. They gave him oxygen, everything. He looked like his eyes was moving.”
“If I would have walked out there, it might have been me,” Smith added.
Neither Hightower nor the Hyundai driver was hurt.