A New York architect who was struck by a hit-and-run driver who plowed into seven pedestrians in Midtown said on Tuesday that it’s a “miracle nobody died.”
Yutian Tang was on the sidewalk chatting with his friend Zheng Zig on Sunday evening when driver Imani Lucas, 29, crashed into them and five others while she was possibly suffering from a manic episode.
“We were waiting for the green light and suddenly there is this car got out of control and just drove into us and after one second we were just on the ground covered in blood,” Tang told The Post. “That’s all I can remember.”
Tang walked away from the accident with a wrist injury, open cuts on his arms and hands, and bruises.
“I was scared because it was my first time to be in such a situation,” he told the Post.
Tang said he needed surgery after cutting a tendon in his left wrist and could not raise his left hand.
“I lost a large amount of my skin so they have to wait for my skin to heal and get better before they can proceed with the surgery,” he said.
Tang was discharged from the Bellevue Hospital on Monday but came back to visit his friend — who suffered more serious injuries.
“I couldn’t find him yesterday, so I came back today to visit him,” Tang told The Post. “Another friend of mine visited him yesterday. They sent me a photo and he looked pretty bad. I think he has injuries on both legs. He was beside me. Both of us got hit!”
Lucas was slapped with seven counts each of attempted murder, assault, reckless endangerment, leaving the scene of an accident, and reckless driving in connection to the Sunday night crash at West 36th Street and Sixth Avenue, authorities said.
While in custody, the New Jersey native was acting irrationally and told cops, “Jesus made me do it,” sources told The Post.
Lucas, who spent time at Long Island Jewish Medical Center before being brought back to the Midtown stationhouse, was remanded and ordered to undergo a psych evaluation during her arraignment in Manhattan criminal court Tuesday night.
Her defense attorney said she was off her meds for bipolar disorder and likely suffered a mental health episode during the violent crash.
“At the age of 10, she was diagnosed as being bipolar and has always been on various medications,” Samuel Feldman told the court. “[Her parents] have reason to believe that this past weekend she was not on her medications.”
The lawyer said that Lucas was seemingly not aware of the charges she faces or why she was in court. She was shaking and appeared confused and distraught while she stood before the judge during her arraignment.
Her parents, both practicing attorneys, were called into the precinct following her arrest to try to calm down their daughter for officers trying to fingerprint her, Feldman said.
“She said she was hearing voices,” her mother, Melissa Lucas, told Gothamist.
Tang, meanwhile, is wary of entirely blaming the incident on Lucas’ mental health.
“From my perspective, she might have had some mental issues for sure but it is also likely to be she was having some emotional trouble — anger or whatever that got out of control,” he said.
“We can’t just blame this on mental illness. We don’t know for sure,” he continued. “I think she has problems. We need to find out if it’s mental illness or not.”
However, Lucas’ mother said she had received a distressing call from her daughter on Sunday night, where her daughter had no idea where she was.
“I asked her, I said, ‘Imani, where are you?’ She didn’t know where she was. She didn’t know where she was going. She said, ‘I’m just driving. I’m just driving.’ And I said, ‘Where are you?’ ‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’ And then that’s when I think I heard a police officer coming up to her talking, and then I heard something like Bayside, Queens.”
Lucas was living with her parents in New Jersey but worked in the city, her mom said, noting that she had “made really big strides” towards independence.
She had driven her car through a red light just before midnight, and struck pedestrians in the crosswalk before heading toward Queens-Midtown Tunnel, authorities said.
One of the pedestrians she hit was an Italian tennis coach Guilia Gardani, La Voce di New York reported.
All of the other pedestrians also suffered non-life-threatening injuries, according to police.
Four men, ages 24 to 60, were also rushed to Bellevue, including a 27-year-old suffering two broken legs, sources said.
A 32-year-old man was taken to Weill Cornell Medical Center, and a 30-year-old man refused medical attention at the scene.
