CHELSEA — A financier with a passion for tennis was killed when he fell from his Citi Bike and was fatally struck by a bus on West 26th Street on Monday morning — the first fatality since the inception of the ride-share program four years ago, police and witnesses said.
Dan Hanegby, 36, an Israeli special forces veteran with two kids in Brooklyn Heights, was riding alongside a charter bus on 26th Street near Eighth Avenue when the two collided, police said.
The operator of the bus and Hanegby both swerved at the same time to avoid hitting something, causing them to strike each other, according to a police source. Police could not say which bus company was involved in the incident.
"The back wheels ran over his body," said Luichys Caba, 37, a super for a building on the block.
Others raced over when they heard what happened to the rider, who wore a navy suit, a white shirt and blue tie, witnesses said.
"I heard a loud thump," said Johnnie Gomez, 56, who works for a nearby warehouse.
"The guy was on his back," Gomez added. "He was moving at first, but then it died out. He was unresponsive. The bike was mangled."
Hanegby was pronounced dead at Bellevue about 10:15 a.m., police said.
The bus driver initially kept moving until witnesses flagged it down.
"The bus kept going at first and I ran after it. Then it put on the signal and pulled over," Gomez said.
The bus driver wasn't immediately charged, police said.
Hanegby had been a tennis phenom growing up in Israel and could've avoided the rigorous compulsory military service there when he turned 18, but decided to enlist anyway, according to The Brown Daily Herald.
"Israel was starting to heat up at that time," he told the college newspaper in 2006.
"There were a lot of suicide bombings. Every week we had something. There isn’t a person in Israel who doesn’t know someone who died in a bombing. So I wanted to do something for my country," Hanegby said.
Hanegby served with the Israeli special forces for three years until he was dismissed in 2002, the Herald reported.
"No tennis win can compare to that feeling of knowing you helped to stop the next suicide bomber. I would definitely do it again," Hanegby told the Brown newspaper.
Hanegby then enrolled at Binghamton University before transferring to Brown where he played on their varsity tennis team, the Herald reported.
After graduation, Hanegby went into finance, first working at Morgan Stanley and then Credit Suisse, according to the company and his social media.
A 2014 Business Insider Australia article dubbed him one of the 53 "most serious tennis players in finance."
Citi Bike said it was the first rider fatality in more than 43 million trips since the program began 2013.
"Together with the City of New York, we wish to express our heartfelt condolences to the rider's family and loved ones on this terrible tragedy,” Citi Bike spokeswoman Dani Simons said in a statement.
