A new law requiring mirrors on the front end of big trucks isn’t being enforced, charged the heartbroken Williamsburg father whose dead 5-year-old son sparked an outcry for the legislation.
Wolf Englender, 36, blasted officials for allowing rigs to remain on the road without having a convex, or crossover mirror attached near the headlights.
Gov. Cuomo signed off on the bill last July, two months after Moshe Englender was hit and killed by a meat truck on Heyward Street near Broadway in Williamsburg.
“The law has been passed and it’s not being enforced,” said Englender who filed suit Wednesday in Brooklyn Supreme Court against the driver for Arnold’s Meat, Pedro Rivera and the truck leasing company MTLR CORP based in Greenpoint.
“The more we talk about it, the more we hope that it will prevent it from happening again,” Englender said.
On May 12, Moshe was out with him mom and other neighborhood kids riding his plastic trike on the sidewalk.
At about 5:30 p.m., Rivera pulled off from the Arnold loading dock which sits in the middle of a row of apartment buildings on Heyward Street,
“He couldn’t see the child in front of the truck,” Englender said. Moshe “was dragged down the street. My wife was right there. She witnessed all of it.”
The death sparked a fury of outrage. The News wrote a series of editorial calling on Albany to pass the mirror law modeled after the demands for school buses – installing circular mirrors around the hood so drivers can see kids in front of them.
The new requirement went into effect in January for trucks, registered in the state and are 26,000 pounds or heavier, found in cities with a population of 1 million or more.
A Daily News reporter standing on Canal Street, near the entrance to the Holland Tunnel, found that one-third of the 43 trucks which should follow the mirror law failed to do so.
“No, no, no,” said one law breaking driver when asked about the missing mirror.
Another driver who had the correct mirrors said his demolition company paid to put them on the red dump truck.
“They work well and it’s good for safety,” the driver said. “But there are some trucks that just don’t have them.”
(Source: NY Daily News)