Speed Limit Lowered on Brooklyn Street Where Samuel Cohen-Eckstein Killed
New York traffic authorities have reportedly lowered the speed limit along a busy Brooklyn street that runs alongside Prospect Park where bar mitzvah boy Samuel Cohen-Eckstein was struck and killed by a van.
City workers installed new signs lowering the maximum speed to 25 mph on Prospect Park West over the weekend, the New York Daily News reported.
The speed limit was 30 mph last October 8 when the eighth-grader was mowed down as he returned from playing soccer in the park across the street from his home.
Traffic lights on the stretch of road were also adjusted to slow down cars.
The boy’s parents, friends and synagogue have joined a citywide push for safer streets.
“Although it is too late to have prevented Sammy’s death, we hope this change is part of a larger initiative to save lives,” the boy’s mother, Amy Cohen, said in an e-mail to the News.
Separately, the paper reported that a neighbor had to call police to stop a woman from tearing down a makeshift memorial that still stands at the site of the boy’s death, near the popular entrance to the park at Third Street.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO