An off-duty police officer was charged with drunken driving after his car hit a garbage truck and flipped onto the sidewalk in Midtown Manhattan early Saturday, knocking down a tree and scratching the marble-and-granite facade of Tiffany & Company’s flagship Fifth Avenue store, according to the police.
The officer, identified as Raphael Ospina, 27, was not seriously injured, the police said. The accident occurred about 3 a.m. at 57th Street and Fifth Avenue.
According to police reports, the officer was heading east on 57th Street in a black Chrysler 300 sedan with two male passengers when his vehicle struck the private sanitation truck, which was westbound and turning south on Fifth Avenue. The sedan spun and turned over in front of Tiffany’s, littering the pavement with shattered glass and blood.
The driver was pinned inside the sedan, and emergency workers had to cut through the roof to get him out, according to a Fire Department spokesman. A passenger was taken to Bellevue Hospital Center, and the other two occupants were taken to NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center.
All three were treated for cuts and bruises, and one passenger had a broken arm, the police said. The driver of the garbage truck was not hurt, the police added.
The officer is assigned to the 25th Precinct in East Harlem, according to officials. He was charged with driving while intoxicated, the police said. Under department protocol, his arrest would result in an automatic 30-day suspension without pay.
Nearly all traces of the crash had been removed by the time Tiffany’s opened at 10 a.m. on the eve of Valentine’s Day. White scrapes and black scuff marks lined part of the store’s wall, and the wall was slightly chipped near a display window stocked with red mailboxes filled with letters and sparkly heart-shaped jewelry. In a statement, a spokesman for Tiffany’s described the damage as “negligible.”
No comments:
Post a Comment