Crash mom dies
The off-ramp of doom has claimed another life.
A mother of two involved in a car crash this week at a treacherous Queensboro Bridge exit ramp died yesterday.
Beatriz “Betty” Rodriguez, 40, is the second person killed in two weeks in crashes off the same ramp.
An eerily similar accident early on March 28 claimed the life of a pedestrian after an out-of-control car speeding off the ramp rammed him.
“They should definitely fix that bridge exit. I think she would be alive today if they would have fixed it,” said Miltza Marquez, a sister-in-law of Rodriguez, who left two teen boys and a husband.
Rodriguez was a passenger in a Volkswagen driven by Alexander Palacio, 39, at 4:07 a.m. Wednesday when it lost control coming off the bridge into Queens, hit a guardrail near the end of the outer-lane exit ramp and careened across Queens Plaza South into two storefronts.
Palacio’s left arm was severed, and Rodriguez suffered serious head wounds.
She died at Cornell Hospital with her estranged husband at her bedside.
Marquez and others are blaming the accidents on the sharply curved exit ramp, part of a $44 million bridge-plaza reconstruction project.
The off-ramp reconstruction, under way for three months, is part of planned improvements at Queens Plaza North and South.
The construction has forced traffic from that and an adjacent exit ramp to be funneled into a single lane of Queens Plaza South.
Grant Riddell, 35, who lost control on the same exit ramp last week and suffered a severed arm, told The Post from his bedside at Bellevue Hospital, “I heard there’s been another crash.
“I’m in a lot of pain,” he added.
