The driver who fatally hit two kids in a March Park Slope collision was found dead at her home on Tuesday, police said.
A friend discovered Dorothy Bruns, 44, who killed 4-year-old Abigail Blumenstein and 1-year-old Joshua Lew — and injured three others including Blumenstein’s then-pregnant mother, Tony Award–winning actress Ruthie Ann Miles, who subsequently lost her unborn baby due to her injuries — at her Staten Island home near a bottle of pills and a suicide note, according to a New York Post.
Cops sent her body to the medical examiner, who will determine a cause of death, police said.
In May, prosecutors charged Bruns, who suffered from multiple sclerosis and had a history of seizures, with reckless manslaughter, claiming she ignored doctors’ orders when she got behind the wheel of her car on March 5 and blew through a red light at Fifth Avenue and Ninth Street, fatally striking the children after allegedly suffering an epileptic fit while driving.
Bruns faced up to 15 years if convicted of reckless manslaughter, and spent several months on Rikers Island following her indictment, until she scrounged up enough dough to make bail in September.
She last appeared before Kings County Supreme Court Justice Danny Chun at an October pre-trial hearing, after which she refused to answer this reporter’s questions about her case.
Bruns’s death did not have anything to do with any setbacks in her legal battle, according to her attorney David Jacobs, who called the incident and the circumstances surrounding it “a tragedy all around.”
If anyone you know exhibits signs of suicide, call New York City’s free, confidential Samaritans Suicide Prevention Center hotline at (212) 673–3000.
