UPPER EAST SIDE — An elderly resident was struck and killed by an SUV backing into a parking spot on East 71st Street and Third Avenue this week — marking at least the second pedestrian fatality at the intersection since May.
Lee Strong, 83, of East 71st Street, was standing in the crosswalk at the southwest corner of the intersection on Saturday just before 10:40 a.m., when a man driving a 2015 Chevrolet Traverse stopped in the intersection and reversed to get a parking spot, police said.
The driver hit her with the rear driver side of the car and knocked her down, authorities said.
Strong, who was unconscious and unresponsive with head trauma, was rushed to NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center, where she was pronounced dead on Sunday, police said.
The driver, whose name has not been released, stayed on scene, and no charges were filed against him as of Thursday.
The intersection has now seen two pedestrian deaths this year and two pedestrian injuries, one in 2012 and one in 2015, according to the city's Vision Zero Map.
In May, Vincent Downing was walking west in the crosswalk on Third Avenue, when a blue sedan pinned him against a parked box truck as it was backing up, police said. He too died of head trauma at the same hospital.
Strong was a grandmother, who "loved tennis and Barbra Streisand, Paris and Phoenix, beaches and lakes, book group and the National Enquirer, pizza and jujyfruits, but nothing could compare with her love for her family," according to an online obituary.
She was born in Chicago and graduated from Francis W. Parker School and Wellesley College, the obituary reads.
Her funeral was held on Thursday morning at Temple Emanu-El of New York on Fifth Avenue and 65th Street.
