Cops have charged recidivist scofflaw Miriam Yarimi with manslaughter among other counts stemming from the repeatedly reckless driver's decision to run a red light at high speed on Ocean Parkway on Sunday, killing a mother and her two children.
The horrific crash — and death of children ages 5 and 8 — has once again led to outrage from street safety advocates who have long championed a redesign of the highway like road through one of the city's densest neighborhoods, as well as legislation that would prevent drivers like Yarimi — who had racked up more than a dozen speed-camera tickets in the last year — from speeding by forcing her to install a speed-limiting device.
That bill is pending in Albany.
Meanwhile, Yarimi, still handcuffed to a bed at Kings County Hospital, was hit with a slew of charges either late on Saturday or on Sunday, including three counts of manslaughter, three counts of criminally negligent homicide, four counts of assault, plus reckless driving, unlicensed driving (her license had previously been suspended for reasons that the NYPD has not revealed), failure to yield and excessive speeding.
According to police, the 32-year-old Yarimi was driving her 2023 Audi A3 northbound on Ocean Parkway at around 1 p.m. on Saturday when she ran a red light at the intersection of Quentin Road and struck a 2023 Toyota Camry cab that had just turned onto Ocean Parkway from westbound Quentin Road.
The speed at which Yarimi was driving propelled her car through the intersection, where she struck four pedestrians: 34-year-old Natasha Saada and her children. The two daughters — Diana and Deborah — were killed while a 4-year-old boy was injured and remains in critical condition.
A funeral for the victims will be held today at 4:30 p.m. in the Orthodox Jewish community of Borough Park, near the crash site.
At a press conference on Saturday, Mayor Adams called the crash an "accident," but this fatal crash was anything but random. Yarimi's record shows a complete disregard for safety; since August 2023, her car has been slapped with 99 tickets, including 21 camera-issued speeding tickets, five red-light tickets and three bus lane violations.
Worse, she has flaunted her recklessness in TikTok and Instagram videos that have celebrated her lifestyle as a top-end wigmaker. Here she is speeding on Ocean Parkway (albeit only slightly because she's approaching a light):
And in this video, she admits she drives around "like a chicken without a head" when delivering wigs. That video shows a previous license plate — WIGMAKER — that had racked up two speeding tickets in just one month in 2023.
Her Instagram account is filled with glam shots of her on vacations and in cars.
Activists have said they will gather at the crash scene on Monday to demand passage of a state bill by Sen. Andrew Gounardes to require the installation of speed-limiting devices on the cars of drivers who have accrued six or more camera-issued tickets in a year.
“If Albany had passed this bill when it was first introduced, this vehicle would already have been speed limited and this crash would never have happened,” said Ben Furnas of Transportation Alternatives. “We can’t afford for Albany to wait another year to act on this urgent problem, lives are at stake and we have the solution.”
