Two Killed in Cambria Heights Crash
July 20, 2003
By Xiomara Lorenzo and Melanie Lefkowitz
Staff Writers
A car full of children looking for fireflies collided with a speeding motorcycle in a Cambria Heights intersection Saturday night, killing the bike’s operator and a 2-year-old girl riding in the car, police said Sunday. Three other children were also injured in the deadly crash. “I got there and they let me see her,” the dead girl’s uncle, Lewis Murphy, 30, said of his trip to the hospital. "She was gone. All because of a bike. “Her eyes looked like little buttons all the time,” said Murphy, cradling a pair of white leather booties his niece, Janae Forde, was wearing when she died. Relatives said Janae; her mother, Viviann Rodriguez, 23; two cousins, Kaia and Chenee Williams, 6 and 12; and Rodriguez’s foster brother Joshua Gonzalez, 14; were on a mission to find fireflies in a local park at 10 p.m. Saturday. They couldn’t find any in their own backyard, relatives said.
Rodriguez paused for a stop sign at 121st Avenue and Springfield Boulevard before proceeding west into the intersection, where she collided with a Suzuki motorcycle driven by martial-arts expert Curtis Battle, 33, heading south on Springfield, police said. Rodriguez’s 2003 Hyundai then crashed into two parked cars. Battle did not have a stop sign but appeared to have been speeding, police said. He was pronounced dead at Franklin General Hospital and Janae at Long Island Jewish Hospital.
Kaia Williams, of Staten Island, was in critical condition at Long Island Jewish, police said. Chenee, also of Staten Island, and Joshua Gonzalez, of Hollis, were stable at Franklin General Hospital. Viviann Rodriguez, who was not injured, was left completely distraught, police said. She told relatives she didn’t see the motorcycle until it hit. “She never saw it, all she did was hear it,” Murphy said. Murphy said all the children were sleeping and seat-belted in the car when it crashed. Police said Janae was in a child-safety seat. “She was just learning how to put her sentences together,” Janae’s grandmother, Emily Rodriguez, said. Emily Rodriguez said she passed the accident scene Saturday night without realizing it. “I was coming back from Pathmark and I saw a lot of lights,” she said. “I thought it was construction.”
Police said Battle, a black belt in karate and owner of the Martial Arts Academy on Merrick Boulevard, was riding with another motorcyclist at the crash. A witness said several motorcycles were rallying there all day. “There were a bunch of bikers,” said the witness, who did not want his name printed. Friends and relatives said Battle, of Jamaica, was teaching karate while working on a degree in physical therapy. He’d been riding motorcycles since high school and was never reckless, they said.
“He wasn’t a daredevil,” said Eli LaSalle, 23, a student of Battle’s. “He has his principles and discipline. He lived by these every day.” Battle’s relatives said he was running a summer camp for kids out of his academy, which he bought in 1994. “‘Ma, I see this building I want,’” his mother, Carolyn Battle, recalled Curtis saying. " ‘I want to put in a karate school.’ I said he should wait until after he was done with college, but he went on with it." His students, they said, looked to him for lessons not just in karate but in life. “He was one of a kind,” his brother, Cedric, said.