The 8-year-old girl who was hit by an out-of-control driver in Queens was killed in front of her family during a shopping outing for her brother’s 17th birthday, heartbroken relatives said Saturday.
Jashanty Cole had just left Jimmy Jazz in Jamaica around 5:30 p.m. when a Range Rover came barreling over the curb along 164th Street, hitting the girl and at least one other passerby, 65-year-old Yuniang Cong.
Cong also died from her injuries, cops said.
“We came out of Jimmy Jazz, shopping for her brother’s birthday, and a couple minutes later, I heard a car coming but did not know from where,” the girl’s legal guardian, Phylecia Harris, 71, said Saturday from the family’s Springfield Gardens home.
The family was shopping ahead of Cole’s 17-year-old brother’s birthday, which falls on Halloween.
The distraught teen held his face in his palms Saturday in the family’s home.
The crash scene on 164th Street in Jamaica, Queens on Oct. 30, 2020.Wayne Carrington“She was very well known in the neighborhood,” Harris said of the third-grader at P.S. 045 Clarence Witherspoon in Queens. “She was a very happy girl. She loved gymnastics, and she was an artist who designed some of her own clothes.”
Cong’s son, Winter Guerra, a robotics researcher from MIT, said her family is also grieving.
“Yuniang Cong was a talented artist and loving mother,” he said in a statement.
“She loved calligraphy, watercolor, and charcoal sketches. She liked sketching outdoor scenes from all over NYC and China.
“Some of her best watercolor works are of the Coney Island Amusement Park and the Lotus pond in the botanic garden,” he said.
Police are investigating the cause of the crash. The driver, 47, told cops she lost control of the vehicle.
