I'm Macy Egeland.

In 2025, Newsday launched a year-long investigation into Long Island's dangerous roads.

On average, every seven minutes, a crash causes a death, injury, or significant property damage.

Many of our neighbors have been devastated by the death of a loved one.

We explore the issue in this Newsday documentary.

Early mornings illustrate the dream of Long Island.

This is the birthplace of the suburbs.

A place to raise a family away from the bustling city.

But reality hits by rush hour.

Two counties totaling 3 million residents and 2.3 million registered vehicles.

And with that comes staggering statistics.

High numbers of traffic collisions and fatalities.

The leading cause of accidental death among young people on Long Island.

Two of those males were 14 years old.

They were pronounced deceased there at the scene.

And the number of serious and fatal accidents have been rising.

I never ever in my wildest dreams would have imagined I'd be burying a child.

She was my everything.

Unbearable loss has turned some residents toward advocacy.

Statistics of people getting killed in these accidents continue to climb.

It just made my mission even more passionate for me.

Conversations with dozens of victims, community leaders, experts and lawmakers.

Newsday reporters spent this year trying to understand how we got here.

And ultimately answer, is this just part of life on the island?

Or can something be done to stop this?

[Electronic alert] [Robotic voice] The police have been detected.

Today at the dollar store next to where Aunt Andrea had her old nail salon, I was shopping for a travel toothbrush and had a memory of Angelica.

I was a week away from my 13th birthday and Angelica was 14.

You know, February 19, 2008, we were on our way to the movies with our friends from church.

And it was 12 o'clock in the afternoon.

I remember approaching that intersection and out of the corner of my eye, that last second, I saw a black vehicle in my peripheral.

It was so quick, all I had time to do was gasp.

And the driver, I'll never forget, she looked at me from that gasp, and then there was the impact.

It clicked, oh my God, the girl's in the back seat, Angelica's in the back seat.

And I looked back and in that moment, I saw Angelica hunched over.

They had switched seats right before they got in the car.

So... I'm sorry.

My daughter has tremendous survivor's guilt that it should have been her.

So that's a very hard pill to swallow.

And I asked one of the EMTs, I was like, "Tell me and be honest, is my sister going to die?"

And she looked at me and she didn't even know what to say.

And I said, "It's okay, I already know."

And I just knew.

I just knew that she was going to be gone.

I think anyone who drives on Long Island has been exposed to some of the shortcomings of how the roads are engineered.

It goes back to the history of how they were created.

You go back to Robert Moses trying to get people as quickly as possible from New York City to the beaches and the parks he created.

Our roadways were designed over 100 years ago, when we were an agricultural community with about 40,000 residents.

And now we have a population of 1.4 million.

To take that population and to put it in the same space, we have crowded roadways, we have aggressive driving, we have distracted driving.

You put all that together.

This is what's leading to crashes, injuries and fatalities.

Newsday's investigation found that traffic crashes killed more than 2,100 people in Suffolk and Nassau counties between 2014 and 2023 and seriously injured more than 16,000 others.

Long Island in 2023 had a fatality rate of 7.6 per 100,000 population, 36 percent higher than the New York State average.

There were nearly six times as many traffic fatalities as homicide victims on Long Island that year.

My house is a little quiet these days.

Went to the game, after the game ended, he was on his way home.

I called my son, called my son, called my son.

I was getting no answer.

Fifteen-year-old Amir Porterfield was struck and killed while crossing Sunrise Highway.

A month earlier, another person was killed at the same intersection.

Amir's death was in one of Long Island's deadliest areas for pedestrians and cyclists, according to our investigation, with more than 16 deaths or serious injuries in that community alone, according to five years of data.

He wasn't doing anything he wasn't supposed to do.

He was a normal, regular 15-year-old kid, being a normal, regular kid, coming home from school.

Intersections are among the most common places for collisions.

The five most deadly intersections on Long Island have similarities.

Often multiple lanes with long crosswalks with active shopping centers nearby, they allow right turns on red lights and relatively high speeds on green.

One intersection alone, Straight Path and Sunrise Highway in Lindenhurst, had 17 fatal or serious car crashes in the decade of data collected.

My sister, she had big dreams.

It feels like two people were just erased out of this planet, out of the world.

Like, one moment they were here and in a split second they were gone.

August of 2023 was one of Long Island's deadliest months.

32 people were killed in car-related crashes.

Among them, Ismenia and Odalis Ureña.

The parents of two were killed by a drunk driver on their way home from dinner.

I'm grieving, taking care of five kids, three different schools, and now I'm learning a new career in the mix of all of it.

If you sit and think about what's happening, you're going to crumble.

While these crashes are physically devastating, a hidden cost are the financial burdens placed on surviving family members or survivors themselves saddle with mounting medical bills and lost income.

The insurance company and the labs, the nursing home, Health First when I had that, these are my new bills.

I can't afford to pay them.

And when I open them I feel I'm obligated to call them and say, "Right now I can't."

And some people understand, some don't.

My kids would come to the hospital and hold my hand every time I had to go to the hospital for surgery.

This girl took a lot from me and I'm just disgusted.

I don't know what to say anymore about how I feel.

Nakaine Bartholin of Deer Park was once an active and financially independent dialysis nurse until she was hit by a admitted drunk driver.

When I woke up in ICU, that's when the doctors and the nurses told me that's what happened.

The driver who hit Nakaine had the minimum insurance required to drive in New York State.

Nakaine's medical bills totaled more than $7 million.

And her attorney says she's on the hook for up to $700,000 in medical expenses that her former health insurance company has declined to cover.

The individual who crashed into Nakaine that night had the New York State minimum of bodily injury liability coverage, which is twenty five thousand dollars.

Twenty five thousand dollars, that's what New York State requires drivers to carry in insurance.

Twenty five thousand dollars wouldn't cover a week of her medical bills.

So she's left stranded.

In 2023, car crashes on Long Island cost at least three point four billion dollars.

Impaired driving is one of many causes of accidents on Long Island.

Authorities say aggressive driving incidents have been on the rise since the COVID-19 pandemic, and agencies issued more than 83,000 aggressive driving tickets just last year.

To capture aggressive driving behaviors on Long Island roads, Newsday journalists utilized dash cam cameras during the course of reporting the story.

It's not just a road rage incident.

It's people speeding.

It's people cutting in and out between the lanes, trying to get in front of the car that they think is going too slow in front of them.

It's people illegally crossing the H.O.V.

barrier coming back into the highway when no one's expecting them there.

Anybody who drives too fast, anybody who drives too closely behind somebody else, anybody who doesn't utilize a directional, all of that could be considered aggressive driving.

Of course the most dangerous one that we see is the cutting in and out, trying to have some kind of speed race.

It's just been, it's just been horrifying.

And I really don't know how to put it into words.

Aggressive driving causes two thirds of the nation's traffic fatalities, according to Arizona State University's Center for Problem Oriented Policing.

It was an aggressive driver who weaved through traffic at 93 miles per hour, was high on marijuana, and killed Ciara Hare and two of her friends.

People are not driving normally.

I'm on the Southern State Parkway.

I'm worried because cars are flying by me, people crawling up behind you.

Everybody wants to go fast.

There's a subgroup of people that might be stressed or frustrated with things that are happening in their life, then they can often become more impulsive.

I think a lot of people don't take driving very seriously.

You know, it's so routine, right?

People might drive two, three times a day to and from work.

You know, cars, you know, have been built in with a lot of safety features now.

People do kind of take it for granted a little bit that it is a risky behavior.

I've seen women, I've seen men, I've seen young, I've seen older, I would say.

Two years ago I had an encounter with a middle-aged woman who was driving 95 miles an hour with a two-year-old in the back seat of the car.

I remember just replaying what happened, like what happened, you know, just trying to make sense.

Why would someone blow a red light?

It just didn't make sense.

I never thought that someone could potentially be under the influence or be an irresponsible driver.

The driver of the car that crashed into the Nappi teens, Steven Catalano, was convicted of reckless driving and had seven license suspensions.

There are at least 50,000 drivers on Long Island with a suspended or revoked license or no license at all.

Suspended or unlicensed drivers are four times more likely to cause a crash.

I tried to tell myself, you know, he didn't mean to get up that morning and kill my daughter.

You know, people make mistakes in life.

He ended up going to my daughter's graveside You could see that he was very much affected by it and all And I just reminded him, I said, "You know what?"

I said, "My daughter doesn't have a second chance, but you do" You know, "Please, make something good happen" Passing this law kind of gave me that comfort that something good, if you if you could call it good, came out of my daughter's death because I couldn't find any other thing to make sense out of it.

Her mission was fighting for stronger penalties for unlicensed drivers.

Angelica's law did lower the number of suspensions before a driver can be charged with a felony for unlicensed driving, but she fought for 16 years before was finally passed in 2023.

10 suspensions brought down to 5 is still what I consider a slap on the wrist consequence because anybody that buries a child is facing a lifetime sentence.

Ultimately, God bless the Nappi family, but that was ultimately passed on their behalf was not the bill they started with.

It reduced to five very specific types of suspensions.

It's a stepping stone law.

There's much work that needs to be done to make our roads safer.

The question is, you know, who is going to carry the torch?

Every time I see one of these stories, the first thought I have is that didn't have to happen.

Can Long Island make the changes necessary to stop dangerous behavior and slow drivers down on Long Island roads?

Experts like Charles DiMaggio say there are three methods to fixing the problem.

The three E's.

Education is tell people listen this is dangerous don't do it don't text while you're driving.

It's helpful, it's useful, it only goes so far.

Then we do enforcement.

Well if you're gonna do this we're gonna ticket you.

You know if you're gonna drive while you're drunk we're gonna put you in jail.

That also has an effect.

What we found is that the most effective approach really without question is engineering changes.

The biggest challenge is getting people to realize that hundreds of people are injured every single year right here in our own community.

And the only way we can prevent that is by changing our infrastructure.

Just outside of DC, in Montgomery County, our reporters went to speak to community leaders who say their infrastructure changes are working and saving lives.

I've lived in Montgomery County for about 25 years and I lived in Nassau County for almost the same amount of time.

And the two communities are really similar.

The street structure was one where it supported cars going really fast so that they could both go into the city, whether it's Washington, D.C.

or New York.

Montgomery County, the most populated county in Maryland and over one million residents, adopted Vision Zero a decade ago.

Vision Zero is a global strategy aimed at completely eliminating traffic fatalities.

Things like road diets, making our roads more narrow, there is an effect that occurs that people slow down more no turn on red signs.

Putting more automated enforcement in high inci enforcement works.

It slows people down.

And then also supporting public transportation In July of 2025 Montgomery County made buses free for all residents, hoping to make the alternative to driving more equitable and attractive.

You have median refuges.

You have a multi lane street and it is hard to cross both directions at once.

You put a refuge in the middle so that people can only have to cross one direction at a time.

Bump outs to reduce the exposure or the amount of space that people are exposed to vehicles when they're crossing the street.

We have added a lot of separated bike lanes throughout the county like the one that's behind me here.

Intersection treatments like roundabouts or pedestrian hybrid beacons that are also known as hawk signals.

People talk and say they do not like the changes that we've made.

And in turn, what I tell our residents is I don't like the fact that 600 of our neighbors were injured and 19 were killed last year alone.

We still have more work to do.

But here in Montgomery County, that work is paying off.

Can Long Island replicate the success of other municipalities?

On December 10th, Newsday held a town hall at our Melville studios to speak with driving safety experts and to hear from the public.

I think success is zero deaths on the roadway.

To shoot for anything less than that is unacceptable.

When you talk about zero deaths, that sounds a lot like what they call Vision Zero, which is kind of this all-hands-on-deck approach to addressing this problem.

It's been adopted in cities all over the world, including our neighbor to the west, New York City, and they've had great results.

I mean, I know Queens Boulevard is much transformed from the boulevard of death that it was.

Hoboken has now gone eight years without any fatalities on its roads.

Is it too much to hope for an island-wide Vision Zero?

You know, to actually really work on the goal of zero deaths, not just making streets for all, but really looking at bringing deaths down from, hopefully, to zero, I think could be done, but it would be a challenge given how many different municipalities and entities we work with.

To have a one-size-fits-all approach for all of Long Island probably wouldn't work because of all the different configuration of roadways.

You'd have to go individual roadway by roadway to configure it in a way that would make it safer.

That's going to be difficult to do.

It is going to be expensive to do.

More than 100 Long Islanders attended Newsday's Dangerous Roads Town Hall, many adding their voices to the discussion.

What about putting more pedestrian bridges?

Street lighting.

Where are the police?

Politicians locally should make this more of an issue, just safety in general, because that's bipartisan.

Who couldn't agree with that, right?

Where my son was hit and killed at the intersection, there has been multiple, multiple deaths.

I know personally, after everything that I've done, there's bad lighting over there on the roads.

After so many deaths there, I still don't understand why there's not a camera there.

While none of the panelists indicated Long Island lawmakers would soon adopt Vision Zero, they did support the coordination of authorities to tackle dangerous roads.

What I have found in trying to get legislation changed and to make a difference is they didn't care what a prosecutor thought.

They don't necessarily care what a state deputy commissioner thinks.

But what makes a difference are you, the victims here.

It is an emotional drain for all of you to be here and to share the worst of the worst that has happened to you and you're doing it with the hopes of making those changes so another family isn't sitting next to you.

Turning trauma into advocacy.

Angelica's sister Nicolette Nappi-Franzone is now a Mothers Against Drunk Driving program specialist and Angelica's mother Dawn Rendot was able to watch the unveiling of Angelica Nappi Avenue, a portion of Woodside Avenue and Patchogue, dedicated in her honor.

I hope there's significant change on our roadways because.

I'm so tired of hearing it.

I'm so tired of hearing about people that are driving and killing innocent people because it could be anybody.

It could happen to anybody.

Nobody is immune from tragedy.

Joining me now to discuss our investigation is Newsday Transportation reporters Peter Gill and Alfonso Castillo.

We appreciate you both being here.

Peter, we want to start with you.

What led Newsday to launch this investigative series?

We, you know, at Newsday have to cover fatal car crashes all the time on a daily basis.

You know, hundreds of people killed, thousands of people injured.

And so we wanted to look at like why this is happening and, you know, what are some of the causes and what are some of the solutions?

It's a major problem here across Long Island and Nassau and Suffolk County, really all regions.

It affects all of us.

Alfonso, what are some of the major findings from this year long investigation that you found?

I think the biggest finding is that this is not inevitable.

I think for so many people for so long, the thought is living on an island of 3 million people, this is just kind of the cost of doing business.

And through our reporting, we have found that there are reasons for all these different crashes, whether it is a failure to the criminal justice system, poor road design, a lack of maintenance, and each one of those can be addressed.

We looked at so many topics.

I mean, enforcement, pedestrian fatalities, things like that.

You wrote about the island's most dangerous intersections, for instance.

What makes them so, and what did those intersections have in common?

Yeah, not only did I get to write about them some in our newsletter, but I got to cross a lot of them and it's really perilous.

And what was the case with all the ones I went to was that there were definitely issues of design.

I mean some didn't have so much as a crosswalk or a walk don't walk sign.

And again, these are tangible things that can be addressed.

And those were across the island.

It wasn't just in some areas.

Yes, that's right.

Okay, so Peter, let's get back to you.

We saw in the documentary that you went to Montgomery County up near DC.

We saw how they've been dealing with these car-related deaths.

Explain for us again what Vision Zero is.

Is that something that could be replicated here on Long Island?

Vision Zero is a global movement that dates back to the 90s in Europe and has been gaining traction in the U.S.

in the last decade or so.

And basically the underlying credo of it is that fatal crashes and serious injuries can be prevented and to do so requires more driver education, more enforcement by police, but really heavily and most importantly changing the engineering of roadways and road designs.

And so Montgomery County is, we went there because it's a one of the few suburban areas in the U.S.

that has really tried to figure this out at scale.

And what they've done is over the last eight years, you know, they've built many miles of sidewalk, protected bicycle lanes, certain intersections are outfitted with aprons to reduce the turning radius and force people to slow down as they go through the intersection.

And you know compared to Long Island they have a fatal crash rate about half of Long Island's and you know far better than the US as a whole as well and so we wanted to go and kind of look at what they're doing and see what sort of things can be done here.

And you know I think many of the things that they've done can be.

I think on the other hand they're not always politically popular.

Everybody likes to get from point A to point B as fast as they possibly can and and sometimes some of these you know things like road diets where you narrow the lanes on a road or actually take out a lane can reduce you know crashes but they also you know take can increase congestion and so they haven't always been popular but that said on Long Island you know Brookhaven already has a Vision Zero plan that they published last summer and they are planning out to roll out a number of projects on their roadways over the coming years.

Suffolk County has has made a declaration of Vision Zero but is and is coming out with a plan that will address the underlying vision or philosophy of Vision Zero, they've told me.

Okay.

And so yeah, I mean that it can be done.

I think it can be challenging politically.

Yeah, absolutely.

People don't necessarily love change.

Thank you so much.

We explored several of these issues that we've talked about today in depth.

So thank you again, Peter, Alfonso, for your time, your work on this important topic.

You can read more about all of these topics in our investigative series on Newsday.com/DangerousRoads.

I'm Macy Egeland.

Thanks for watching.

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