The son of a 72-year-old Brooklyn man killed by a hit-and-run driver says he wants justice for his father — and a look at surveillance footage of the grisly incident.
Larry Maxwell was crossing the street outside his longtime home in Brownsville’s Langston Hughes Houses to attend a family cookout in a nearby park Saturday when he was struck by a driver fleeing a fender-bender. The driver has not been caught.
“There are so many cameras,” Maxwell’s distraught son, Larnce Vargas, 41, said of the on-the-loose driver. “So why is he still at large, if there’s so many cameras? Y’all can find any and everybody else but y’all can’t find him. That don’t make sense.”
First responders rushed Maxwell unconscious and unresponsive from the scene on Sutter Ave. near Osborn St. to Brookdale University Hospital, where he died, cops said.
The victim had been talking with his son, who lives nearby, earlier that afternoon.
“I was just on the phone with him,” Vargas said. “We just finished watching the Knicks game actually. Right after the game we were supposed to meet up at the park across the street for a cookout — right across the street from the building he was coming out of. He got struck right in front of the building.”
The family now plans to hold a vigil for Maxwell Friday on what would have been his 73rd birthday.
That horrific hit-run happened just moments after the driver collided with a 2023 Chevrolet Malibu traveling east on Sutter Ave. about 6:30 p.m. Saturday, cops said.
The 46-year-old driver of the Malibu and a passenger remained at the scene and were not hurt, police said. The other driver kept going and slammed into Maxwell without stopping.
Vargas said investigators haven’t given him much to go on.
“They just giving me, ‘Oh, we’re still looking at footage, we’re still looking at footage,’” Vargas said. “I want to see the footage too. Why can’t we see the footage?”
Vargas described his dad, a retired maintenance worker, as a hard-working man who looked out for and got along with everybody.
Vargas said his father had 15 kids, ranging in age from 31 to 55, including two who preceded him in death.
“He was always there for his kids and his grandkids,” Vargas said.
Vargas said he couldn’t believe the driver was so reckless.
“He didn’t care what he did,” Vargas said. “He didn’t care about my father. He didn’t care about nothing. Man, if that’s the case, he killed my father. He murdered my father. I need justice for my father.”
Maxwell’s sister, Debora Ferguson, said cops told her that detectives talked to a suspect but have not arrested him yet.
She said the driver cops spoke to claimed he didn’t hit anyone.
“He’s basically now worrying about his life and not the life that he took and the families that he destroyed,” Ferguson said of the suspect.
“The only thing we want is for the prosecutor to have them arrested. He has to take accountability.”
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