Passenger Bails Out of a MOVING Uber

Uber-branded car parked on city street near cyclist — Photo: MOZCO / Shutterstock

When a passenger unexpectedly entered live lanes on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in the early morning hours and was then struck by a motorist whom police arrested on suspicion of driving while intoxicated, the result distilled two hard truths of urban mobility: the margin for error on high-speed arterials is vanishingly small, and New York’s DWI laws make intoxicated drivers answer for deaths even when another person’s actions help set the chain in motion.

The Short Version

Police say a 37-year-old rear-seat passenger left a moving SUV on the westbound BQE near Exit 28 around 2:25–2:30 a.m. and was fatally struck.
EMS pronounced the victim dead at the scene; both involved vehicles stayed on-site, and police reported no contact between them.
NYPD reported arresting a 29-year-old driver, Destiny Mendez, on vehicular manslaughter and DWI-related charges tied to the fatal impact.
Under New York law, intoxicated operation can be a sufficiently direct cause of death even when other factors contribute; prosecutors must still link impairment to dangerous operation.

What Happened on the BQE and What Police Say They Know

Shortly before 2:30 a.m., westbound on the BQE approaching Exit 28 near the Brooklyn Bridge, a woman identified by police as 37-year-old Chasna Thelemaque was riding in the rear passenger area of a Toyota SUV when she opened a door and wound up in the right travel lane, according to police accounts carried by multiple outlets. Moments later, she was struck by a separate vehicle. Emergency medical personnel responded and pronounced her dead at the scene, citing severe trauma consistent with a high-speed impact on a limited-access roadway. Officers noted that the SUV transporting Thelemaque and the striking vehicle remained on scene and that the two vehicles never collided with each other—details that support the sequence in which the victim entered the roadway and was then hit.

Police arrested the striking driver, 29-year-old Destiny Mendez, and reported charges including vehicular manslaughter, vehicular assault, driving while intoxicated, and driving while ability impaired. While those charges reflect the investigating officers’ determinations at the time, formal toxicology numbers or testing specifics had not been published in the initial reporting; early accounts of fast-moving investigations commonly add or refine charges as lab results and reconstruction findings arrive.

Mechanics and Risk: Why a Door Opening on a Limited-Access Roadway Turns Deadly

Limited-access highways are engineered around predictable flows at higher speeds; they are also unforgiving the instant a human body is in the lane. Even at modest night-time speeds on the BQE, a driver’s available sight distance and reaction time leave little room to avoid an unexpected obstacle. A rear passenger’s door opening in motion can produce several mechanisms of egress—loss of balance during a door pull, a misjudged reach for fresh air, or a startle response during a lane change—each capable of projecting a person into live traffic. Absent a shoulder refuge, a person on foot in the right lane effectively becomes a zero-margin hazard. That is why collision investigators scrutinize sequence: occupant egress, path of travel, and the striking vehicle’s line, speed, and braking signatures.

The NYPD’s Highway Investigation Squad typically documents final rest positions, scene measurements, lighting, and driver statements; when available, vehicle event data, dashcams, and traffic cameras help resolve timing within tenths of a second. Here, the detail that the SUV and the striking vehicle never touched reinforces that the fatal force came from the latter vehicle, not an inter-vehicle crash that ejected the victim. That distinction matters both for causation analysis and for assigning charges that fit the physics of the event.

Charges and Causation: How New York Law Fits This Scenario

New York’s vehicular manslaughter and DWI framework does not require prosecutors to prove that intoxication was the sole cause of death. The law asks whether a defendant, operating while intoxicated or impaired, set in motion events in a way that was a sufficiently direct cause of the fatality. Appellate decisions have addressed causation chains where multiple hazards or victim actions were present; in those cases, courts allow conviction when intoxication and operation combined to produce the fatal risk, even amid complicating factors.

There is, however, a second step beyond mere intoxication: prosecutors must link impairment to dangerous operation in fact. Cases involving ejections or complex occupant movements, such as People v. Stickler and related precedents, underscore that the state must establish both the vehicle’s causal role in the death and the connection between impairment and unsafe driving behavior. Applied to the BQE case, that means trial proof would need to marry any chemical or observational evidence of impairment with how Mendez drove—lane keeping, speed, reaction—to show that impaired operation directly contributed to striking a person in the lane. The initial charging decision signals police believe that standard can be met; a courtroom will demand the full evidentiary bridge.

Points of Detail and the Boundaries of What Has Been Reported

Initial reports diverged on descriptors that, while not central to the causation and charge posture, matter to a historian’s reconstruction: whether the SUV was a Toyota RAV4 or Highlander, and whether it was operating as an Uber or a taxi. Some outlets used rideshare language, others did not; police-sourced summaries emphasized the sequence rather than the commercial status of the vehicle. Such inconsistencies are common in the first wave of coverage and often resolve as agency paperwork and court filings clarify vehicle identification and service status.

What the contemporaneous reporting does align on are the backbone facts: rear-seat passenger, door opening in motion, entry into the right lane, fatal strike by a separate vehicle, on-scene death pronouncement, both vehicles present afterward, and a DWI-based arrest of the striking driver. Those facts, rather than brand labels or trim-level debates, drive the public-safety lessons and the legal exposure in a New York courtroom.

Why This Matters Beyond One Night on the BQE

For city and state safety professionals, the case is a reminder that the highest-yield interventions are behavioral and procedural: rear-seat belt use even in for-hire vehicles; clear passenger guidance about never opening doors in live lanes; and driver training—professional, livery, or private—on how to manage unexpected passenger behavior without stopping in dangerous locations. For prosecutors and defense counsel, it illustrates the live edge of New York’s vehicular homicide doctrine, where jurors are asked to sort proximate causation in messy human circumstances, not in the clean hypotheticals of a classroom.