A homeless man who made headlines last year when he was on the run for nearly three weeks after escaping Correction Department custody has been killed by a hit-and-run yellow cab driver who dragged him 12 blocks on the Upper East Side, police said Monday.
James Mossetty, 36, was crossing York Ave. mid-block near E. 72nd St. when the Toyota RAV4 taxi driver slammed into him about 5 a.m. Saturday, cops said.
The cabbie, 71-year-old Abdul Hakim, denied hitting anyone when he was later nabbed — even though he admitted he heard a loud sound, like he’d struck something, and his taxi started going slower, like it was dragging something, prosecutors said.
Hakim is charged with leaving the scene of a fatal crash. He was arraigned Sunday in Manhattan Criminal Court and ordered held on $300,000 bond.
The impact of the crash knocked Mossetty to the ground and he became lodged in the SUV’s undercarriage, cops said.
The driver kept going, with Mossetty only becoming dislodged when the SUV pulled onto the lower level of the Ed Koch Queensborough Bridge after traveling about a mile, police said.
At no point did Hakim stop and check what he’d struck, prosecutors said, even though video surveillance shows the taxi “turning eastbound onto the bridge while visibly dragging the body of the decedent from the rear of the vehicle,” according to a criminal complaint.
Hakim shares the cab with another driver, who immediately noticed the damage to the hood, prosecutors said at Hakim’s arraignment in Manhattan Criminal Court. When that other driver reached out to him to ask about the damage, Hakim denied having been in a crash, prosecutors said.
Details of the hit-and-run shocked the victim’s family.
“We are just outraged at this horrific way that my brother had to die,” Mossetty’s sister, Melanie Pena, 46, told the Daily News. “This is senseless. For the driver to even say that he did not know that he hit my brother and dragged him … over the Queensboro Bridge and left him there to die?”
She added that her brother’s homelessness doesn’t excuse his being left for dead on the pavement.
“This person has family, he has people who care about him,” she said.
His injuries were gruesome, she said.
“My brother did not have a skull (left). He was missing an eye. His body, the left thumb is scraped, his abdomen, he was deformed. We cannot have an open casket,” Pena said, adding that he will be cremated. “It’s just going to be a funeral service with photos of him because we can’t even show his body.”
Mossetty died after being rushed to New York-Presbyterian Hospital Weill Cornell, where he had just recently been discharged after getting medical care, his sister said. The NYPD listed the hospital as the victim’s current address. He was wearing a hospital ID bracelet when killed, his sister said.
“If he had somewhere to go, he wouldn’t have been on the street,” his sister said.
Cops arrested Hakim later that day in Queens. He lives in East Elmhurst, according to cops.
Mossetty suffered from borderline personality disorder and bipolar disorder, his family said.
On June 26, 2024, Mossetty slipped out of Bellevue Hospital, where he had been receiving psychiatric care while in Correction Department custody, as authorities were getting ready to return him to Rikers Island.
NYPD
James Mossetty, 36, who escaped from Bellevue Hospital last year (right), was fatally struck by a car on the Upper East Side on Saturday. (NYPD)
He climbed a median, sprinted across several lanes of traffic on the FDR Drive, stripped out of his orange jumpsuit and hopped on an MTA bus to make his getaway, the New York Times reported. He was nabbed three weeks later.
He had been jailed since that January of that year after being arrested for refusing to pay a yellow cab driver an $84.70 fare after riding in the taxi from Midtown to Queens, where he was living at the time. Cops then found he had warrants for failing to appear in Manhattan Criminal Court dating back to 2021 to face misdemeanor assault, drug possession and theft of services charges.
Mossetty also had a criminal history in Florida, including a 2022 arrest on charges he attacked a cop in Orlando who was working as a school crossing guard.
He was on the run for three weeks before cops nabbed him on July 16, 2024. The status of the escape case wasn’t immediately clear Monday.
“He was definitely trying to get his stuff together,” Mossetty’s brother, who declined to give his name, said of the victim’s life since his escape arrest. “He was definitely loved and we need justice.”
“I guess it’s a relief a little bit because the guy is caught — but no, it’s no relief,” he added. “My brother’s gone. I will never get that back.”
Mossetty was born in Manhattan, grew up on the Lower East Side and had a 17-year-old daughter.
“My brother struggled behavioral-wise,” his older sister, Jessica Hernandez, said. “I raised my brother, my sister. My mother died when I was 17. My brother was 3. My sister was 13…. We did the best we could with what we had. We didn’t have much financially.”
Pena said her brother spent a week at another local hospital after he was found unconscious in the street in the last week of July.
“I think he should have been there longer,” Pena said.
Originally Published: September 1, 2025 at 2:03 PM EDT
