The driver who allegedly crashed into seven pedestrians in a Midtown crosswalk Sunday night — and then got into a second collision in Queens — may have been suffering from a mental health episode, according to family members.
Police said Imani Lucas, 29, was behind the wheel of the Honda Accord that ran a red light and plowed into six men and one woman at the intersection of West 36th Street and 6th Avenue around 11:53 p.m. Sunday. Police said she then continued through the Midtown tunnel, crashing into two other vehicles near Fresh Meadows on the Long Island Expressway before coming to a stop when her car became disabled.
“Imani would never do anything intentionally to hurt anybody or anything,” her mother, Melissa Lucas, told Gothamist by phone. “Nothing like this has happened before.”
Imani Lucas was arrested and charged Monday night with a slew of offenses, including attempted murder and assault.
Melissa Lucas said she was out of state on vacation with her husband when she got a call from her daughter late Sunday night.
“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,’” Melissa Lucas recalled. “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.”
Melissa Lucas thinks her daughter, who suffers from bipolar disorder, may have had a manic episode.
“She said she was hearing voices,” she recalled.
Lucas was living with her parents in the Princeton area of New Jersey, but often worked in the city, her mom said, adding her daughter was eager to become independent and get a place of her own in New York. She had recently started a new job, though her mother did not want to disclose the name of the company.
“To a great extent, Imani has made really big strides and everything in her…
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