On Monday afternoon, police officers were reviewing security footage from Leader Halal Market, at Fifth Avenue and Senator Street, that captured one of the collisions.
Amira Hegab, 40, had arrived at work at the market at 10:00 a.m. and said she heard a commotion about a half-hour later. When Ms. Hegab rushed outside, she saw a young man who seemed badly injured on the street. He was quickly taken away by an ambulance.
“I feel so sorry for him,” she said. “It’s madness.”
A few blocks away, on 72nd Street and Third Avenue, Lilia Gomez, 34, was sitting inside a McDonald’s drinking coffee with a friend when they saw the truck barreling down the street. They rushed outside and saw a man trapped underneath an e-bike, conscious but unable to move.
Parts of the bike were strewn all over the street.
Emergency workers helped free the man and placed him in an ambulance, said Ms. Gomez, who described Bay Ridge as a quiet neighborhood of immigrants, many of them Arab.
“It’s a very peaceful place,” Ms. Gomez said. “I think I’m going to get my kids from school, because I am a little scared by what happened. You don’t see this in Bay Ridge.”
On the same block, Abdul Algumaei was about to step outside the smoke shop where he worked when he saw the driver crash into the man on the bike. Then, he said, the driver tore down the sidewalk in front of his store, followed by police officers who also drove their car on the sidewalk.
Mr. Algumaei, 26, who avoided the vehicles, said he was “shaking.”
“I’m always sitting out there in my chair,” he said.
Chelsia Rose Marcius, Maria Cramer and Liam Stack contributed reporting. Kitty Bennett contributed research.
