Iosif Lontsman was 77. On April 25, 2024, he got out of a 2010 Subaru Forester at Avenue W and Ocean Avenue in Sheepshead Bay to talk to a 43-year-old woman in a Nissan Altima about a parking space. He left the Subaru in drive. The car rolled, dragged him, and pinned him against the Nissan. He was unconscious with head and body injuries when first responders arrived. NYU Langone Hospital-Brooklyn pronounced him dead. The NYPD Highway District’s Collision Investigation Squad took the file. No one was arrested. No one has been charged.
Surveillance obtained by News 12 shows him opening the door and stepping out before the SUV starts to move. His son Mark, 50, told the New York Post the family was struggling to accept the official story. He described his father as «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 Family That Crossed an Ocean, Then a Parking Space
The Lontsmans left the Soviet Union in 1989. Mark said his father worked construction and nursed his wife «until her final days» eight years before the crash. Two sons, two grandchildren — a girl of 12 and a boy of 7. Mark had not yet found the words to tell the children. Lontsman had pushed their strollers, taken the granddaughter to ballet, taken the grandson to the playground.
Federal estimates put rollaway deaths at about 142 a year, with another 2,000 injured. A brake-transmission safety interlock has been required on new automatics since the 2010 model year. Lontsman’s Subaru was a 2010. The interlock does not help if the car is left in drive. Safety agencies still repeat the same two steps: park, parking brake, then get out.
For more from this desk, see The AEGIS Alliance’s US News coverage and the Brooklyn Paper account of the crash.
