Newborn Baby Dies After Parents Get Struck by Driver in New York

Members of the Satmar Orthodox Jewish community mourn over the loss of Nachman and Raizel Glauber.

The baby that miraculously survived when he was forced to be prematurely delivered by Cesarian section after his parents were killed in a hit-and-run accident in New York died on Monday, reports the Washington Post. The city medical examiner’s office said the baby died of extreme prematurity.

Nachman Glauber and his seven-month-pregnant wife, Raizel, who are a part of a tight-knit ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn, died in a grisly car accident shortly after midnight on Sunday.

“The mood in the neighborhood is very heavy,” Oscar Sabel, a retired printer who lives near the scene of the accident, said. “We all hoped the baby would survive. But it’s what God wants. Maybe the baby’s death, and his parents’, is not for nothing; God doesn’t have to give us answers.”

The baby was buried near the fresh graves of his parents where about a thousand community members showed up for the couple’s funeral a day earlier.

Just after midnight on Sunday, Raizel Glauber wasn’t feeling well so the young couple, both 21, decided to go to the hospital so they called a livery cab to pick them up. The cab was at an intersection with a stop sign, but it is unclear whether or not the driver stopped. A speeding gray 2010 BMW struck the cab going at 60 mph, double the speed limit, and ejected Raizel so far from the car that EMT’s could not initially find her. Nachman and the driver, Pedro Nunez Delacruz, were pinned in the cab and had to be cut from the wreckage.

The driver of the BMW fled on foot and is still at-large as police continue to search for his whereabouts.