NYPD Officers Covered For Fellow Cop In Crash, Claims Pratt Employee Run Over On Myrtle Ave

Back on January 11 of this year, 63-year-old Pratt Institute employee Cindy Klumb was hit and run over by a driver on Myrtle Avenue at Ryerson Street. She sustained two broken ribs, a concussion, trauma to her neck and rotator cuff, and injuries that doctors told her could have killed her. But despite multiple witnesses reporting that they saw and identified the offending driver to police, the man was never charged.

Why? According to Klumb, her lawyer, and at least one witness, it’s because he carried an NYPD badge.

In a disturbing account over at Gothamist, Klumb accuses NYPD Officer Orlando Vargas and a detective, Charles Sperco, of covering up for the driver, who her lawyer claims Sperco told him was an auxiliary cop — one of the hundreds of volunteer officers trained and deployed by the NYPD as extra eyes and ears.

One of the responding officers, Officer Orlando Vargas, had begun interviewing the woman helping Klumb when Klumb says the woman spotted the driver hovering around the periphery of the crowd and pointed at him, yelling, “That’s him! That’s the one that hit her! That’s the car parked down there!”

“She said, ‘I tried to stop you! I looked you right in the eye! You’re the one that hit her!'” Klumb said. “The whole time the officer’s just standing there.”

The driver objected, telling Klumb and the good Samaritan that it wasn’t him, that a car in front of him hit Klumb. It took a lot of insistence on the unnamed woman’s part to convince Officer Vargas to go talk to the guy, Klumb said. But as EMTs were loading her into the ambulance on a backboard she says that though her glasses were broken and she could only make out outlines, “I saw their body language. [The driver] relaxed when Vargas got there. It was almost like they had seen each other before.” Then Officer Vargas let the driver go.

All through the ambulance ride, Klumb says, “I kept thinking, why isn’t he detaining him? If this is the person that hit me, why did he let him go?”

[Witness and Pratt student John] Cisneros has a bit of useful information on this end: he says he saw the driver flash a badge to Vargas, and from then until he and Vargas left, wear the badge on a chain around his neck.

The official police report lists the crash as a hit-and-run, “with no description of the vehicle or driver, and no record of him having talked to the female witness. Cisneros is listed as a witness, but he says the detective assigned to the case didn’t call him until seven weeks after the crash, the same time that Klumb first heard from him.”

Klumb’s lawyer, Dmitry Levitsky, told Gothamist that he’s certain of either a cover-up or “a severe breach of protocol by [Officer] Vargas.” L

Levitsky added that a notice of intention to file a lawsuit will be submitted to the city in the coming weeks.

In the meantime, the NYPD confirms that an internal investigation is being conducted.