The parking space at Avenue W and Ocean Avenue is a rectangle of asphalt in Sheepshead Bay, the kind of Brooklyn corner people argue over every afternoon and then forget. On April 25, 2024, shortly before 4:30 p.m., that rectangle killed Iosif Lontsman. He was 77. He lived in Gravesend, about a mile and a half from the corner. He was driving a 2010 Subaru Forester. A 43-year-old woman in a Nissan Altima was in the space he wanted, or thought he had a claim on. He opened his door to talk to her. He left the Subaru in drive. The Forester rolled, struck him, and stopped only when it met the Nissan. He was pinned between the two cars.
Police said he was unconscious when first responders arrived, with severe trauma to his head and body. Medics took him to NYU Langone Hospital-Brooklyn. He was pronounced dead there. The NYPD Highway District’s Collision Investigation Squad took the file. Patch, citing police, put the time at about 4:25 p.m. and identified the vehicle as that 2010 Forester. The New York Post, citing authorities and law enforcement sources, described the same scene a few minutes later in the clock and called it an argument over a parking space. No arrest was announced in the days that followed. No public charging document has named the woman in the Altima, or anyone else. A car that kills its own driver is not, by itself, a crime. Investigators still had to decide whether anything else on that corner was.
Surveillance that News 12 obtained shows him opening the door and stepping out before the SUV starts to move. That sequence is the whole case. He was not struck by a stranger’s car running a light. He was struck by the vehicle he had just been sitting in, because the transmission was still in drive when his weight left the seat. His son Mark Lontsman, then 50, told the New York Post the family was struggling to match that mechanical account to the man they knew. He called his father “a very, very mild-tempered individual” who had “too much respect” for women to pick a fight over a space. “If it’s probably about parking, he would come out and talk to the lady… he’d do it politely,” Mark said.
A worker at a nearby store, who asked not to be named, told the Post the woman in the Nissan was in tears and tried to help. “She put her foot on the brake,” the worker said. “She was shouting, ‘Help, please help, please help.'” The worker added that Lontsman “was a nice guy” who “had children” and “had grandchildren.” That detail cuts against the easiest headline, the one that turns every parking dispute into a rage story. The other driver did not flee. She tried to stop the car that was crushing him. A brake pedal in a second vehicle cannot unwind a body already wedged between two bumpers. It can only hold one of them still while people scream for someone with a jack, a radio, or a miracle.
The family story starts a long way from Avenue W. Lontsman grew up in Kazakhstan. His roots ran through Ukraine and Belarus. The family fled Jewish persecution and reached the United States in 1989, the year the Soviet system was coming apart and Brooklyn was filling with people who had decided a cramped apartment was better than the country they left. He worked construction. Mark told the Post his mother had been looking for “a good-looking Jewish husband who was family-oriented, determined and had the ability to build and support a family.” They were, the son said, “absolutely a team.” When his wife was dying, Lontsman nursed her “until her final days,” about eight years before the crash. He left two sons and two grandchildren, a girl who was 12 and a boy who was 7. He had pushed their strollers, taken the granddaughter to ballet, and taken the grandson to the playground. Mark said he had not yet found a way to tell the children.
A Transmission Does Not Care Why the Door Opened
Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard 114 is the rule that is supposed to stop a parked car from becoming a rolling one. Since the 2010 model year, new automatic-transmission cars sold in the United States have had to include a brake-transmission shift interlock. The driver cannot move the shifter out of park unless the brake pedal is pressed. Lontsman’s Forester was a 2010, right at the start of that rule. The interlock is useless if the car is never put in park. It does not reach into the cabin and yank a man back into the seat. It does not set the parking brake. The sequence safety trainers still repeat is dull on purpose: shift to park, set the brake, shut the engine off, then open the door. He opened the door first.
The national count of deaths like his is older, and thinner, than the way people repeat it. An NBC I-Team investigation reported that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s last published rollaway tally, covering 2012 through 2014, was 142 deaths across those three years. That is not an annual figure, even though the number 142 has been passed around as if it were. The agency has not put out a fresh public national total in the years since. A death in Sheepshead Bay can be investigated by a collision squad, written up by a tabloid, and still never land in a spreadsheet a researcher can cite. The absence of a current count is part of the story. If the federal government cannot say how often a car left in gear kills someone, cities cannot honestly say the problem is rare.
There is a second kind of rollaway, and it is not what happened on Avenue W. On September 4, 2025, Chrysler recalled certain 2024 and 2025 Dodge Charger and Jeep Wagoneer S electric vehicles because an incorrectly installed spring could cause the loss of the park function even when the driver selected park. Those vehicles, regulators said, failed to comply with the same FMVSS 114 rule. In that failure, a driver can do the right thing and the car can still move. Lontsman’s Subaru was the other failure. The shifter did what it was told. The car was in drive because a person left it there. One is a factory mistake. The other is a half-second of habit on a Brooklyn street. Both end with a body between metal and asphalt. Treating them as the same story lets the manufacturers off the hook in one case and lets ordinary drivers pretend the shifter is a suggestion in the other.
Sheepshead Bay’s parking spots are negotiated with a wave, a horn, or a window rolled down. Police sources described an argument. The family described a polite conversation. Both can sit in the same minute. A man can step out to talk without shouting, and the person in the other car can still experience that step as a confrontation. What the public record shows, from News 12’s description of the video and from the police account, is a door opening and a vehicle beginning to roll. It does not, in anything released to the public, show a fight. The violence was the transmission.
Mark’s disbelief is not a denial of physics. It is a son’s refusal to let a parking headline replace a person. A mild-tempered man can still forget to shift to park. Respect for women does not engage a parking pawl. The shop worker’s account, of a crying driver holding a brake and begging for help, fits the son’s version better than a brawl. None of those accounts change the facts the hospital recorded. Severe trauma. Unresponsive. Dead at NYU Langone Hospital-Brooklyn.
There is no defendant to haul into a courtroom if the only person who left the car in gear was the man who died. Highway investigators can reconstruct the gear position, the slope, and the point of impact. They cannot prosecute a habit. Families are left with a story that sounds too small for the size of the loss: not a gun, not a chase, just a grandfather who opened a door. People remember the spectacular crashes. They do not remember to put the car in park.
Lontsman had already done the hard crossing. He left a system that persecuted his family, learned a trade, buried his wife, and spent his seventies on grandchildren’s schedules. The last trip was a mile and a half, from Gravesend to a disputed space in Sheepshead Bay. The machine that ended it was his own. For more on vehicle cases that turn on what a machine did when a person expected it to behave, see The AEGIS Alliance’s report on a California driver whose car left the road for railroad tracks, along with US News and Crime News. The Brooklyn Paper account of the crash and the New York Post interview with Mark Lontsman remain the fullest public records of who he was.
