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A Brooklyn dad and his two kids barely escaped with their lives when they were struck by a vehicle that jumped a curb Wednesday — and the lucky father says the family managed to avoid serious injury only by “animal instinct.”
Marco Diaz, 48, said he and his sons August, 11, and Alex, 9, were heading to the No. 2 subway in Crown Heights just before 8 a.m. when the car plowed into them.
“Out of my peripheral vision I can see this car careening towards us,” Diaz told The Post exclusively on Wednesday.
“I had just enough time,” he said as he described trying to leap out of the way.
“Of course, all of this is sort of an animal instinct,” he added.
The vehicle had been traveling on Nostrand Avenue when the driver lost control and veered left at St. John Place, Diaz said.
“There was no squeal. There was no screeching brakes. It wasn’t like he had, like doughnutted or anything. It just was like this image of this car heading towards us and the only sound — that was like a true telltale sound — was when his tires hit the curb and he popped up over the curb. I looked to my right and realized, ‘Oh, this thing is literally coming at us,’” Diaz said.
August dove out of the way, and Diaz quickly scooped up Alex, whose face was at grill height, to get him out of the way.
“I basically had picked him up. And so I took the blunt of the car hit and he came out of my hands and ended on the hood of the car.”
The car jolted Diaz forward into the closed gate of the Two Saints bar on the corner.
“This would have been an end to Marco except that [the driver] hit the side of the gate like the barrier,” he said. “And so there was just enough space between my now indented gate and the front of his car so that I didn’t get hit again. My little guy rolled off the hood onto the ground. And then his car bounced backwards about four feet or so.”
At that point, Diaz said, he was able to crawl out, get away from the car and find Alex.
“I just wanted to crawl out and not be in front of this car,” he said. “So I crawled out, got my little guy.”
He gives credit to the strangers in the area who tended to the family without hesitation.
“Like a million people swarmed around us immediately and started helping us get situated and making sure no one got up,” he recalled.
His older son, whose face was injured when he hit the pavement after jumping out of the way, was able to get up and walk back to him.
The driver remained on the scene and was taken into custody. He was released after police found his blood alcohol level was zero, a police spokeswoman said.
“They looked at video and they saw that he tried to switch lanes to avoid an accident,” the spokeswoman said. “When he did that, he lost control and went up on the curb.”
Diaz said his stepson was nearby, saw the scene and came running. He then called his mom.
“She came running over frantically of course because she knew what was going on at that moment,” he said.
The family went to Methodist Hospital in ambulances and were examined for injuries.
Diaz said he’s on crutches because of a sprained ligament and the boys have various cuts and bruises, but he’s thankful they weren’t badly injured or worse.
“We miraculously came out of it fairly unscathed,” he said.
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