Police are searching for 44-year-old Julio Acevedo in the deadly hit and run.
Acevedo served 10 years in state prison on a 1989 manslaughter conviction. Authorities said he caused the death of a male victim by shooting him with a gun. He also has a recent driving while intoxicated arrest in February, officials said.
A baby boy delivered after his parents were killed in a hit-and-run accident in Williamsburg, Brooklyn died early Monday.
Isaac Abraham, a community leader and neighbor of the dead couple, says the infant succumbed to his injuries at about 5:30 a.m. at Bellevue Hospital.
The death of the newborn on Monday piled tragedy upon tragedy and compounded the community's grief. The infant was expected to be buried near the fresh graves of his parents, Nachman and Raizy Glauber, both 21. About a thousand community members turned out for the young couple's funeral a day earlier.
"The mood in the neighborhood is very heavy," said Oscar Sabel, a retired printer who lives near the scene of the accident. "We all hoped the baby would survive."
Brooklyn is home to the largest community of ultra-Orthodox Jews outside Israel, more than 250,000. The couple married last year and were living in the Williamsburg neighborhood.
They were members of the Satmar Hasidic sect, whose men dress in dark coats and hats, wear long beards like their Eastern European ancestors and have limited dealings with the outside world. Raizy Glauber grew up in a prominent rabbinical family. Her husband was studying at a rabbinical college; his family founded a line of clothing for Orthodox Jews.
Sabel, dressed in the traditional long black coat of the Satmar, said it was a terrible tragedy.
"But it's what God wants," he said. "Maybe the baby's death, and his parents', is not for nothing; God doesn't have to give us answers."
Shortly after midnight Sunday, Raizy Glauber, who was seven months pregnant, wasn't feeling well, so the couple decided to go to the hospital, said Sara Glauber, Nachman Glauber's cousin. They called a livery cab, a hired car that is arranged via telephone, not hailed off the street like a yellow cab.
The livery cab had a stop sign, but it's not clear if the driver stopped. Police said the collision with the BMW reduced the cab to a crumpled heap, and Raizy Glauber was thrown from the wreck. The engine ended up in the back seat, according to Isaac Abraham, who serves as a spokesman for the Satmar community.
Police said the driver of the BMW ran away.
How Acevedo came to possess the BMW is also under investigation. The registered owner, Takia Walker, was charged with insurance fraud Sunday in a scam involving the car. She was not involved in the crash, police said.
Walker allegedly acquired the car under false pretense, and let a third party who was not on the insurance drive it.
After the accident, Nachman Glauber was pinned in the car, and emergency workers had to cut off the roof to get him out, witnesses said. His wife landed under a parked tractor-trailer, said witnesses who came to the scene after the crash.
Both of the Glaubers were pronounced dead at hospitals, where doctors performed a cesarean section on the mother to deliver the baby. Both parents died of blunt-force trauma, the medical examiner said.
The Glaubers' livery cab driver was treated for minor injuries at the hospital and was later released. Both the driver of the BMW and a passenger fled and were being sought, police said.
"Whoever did not go through this can't even contemplate what this is to lose a sister, and her husband and more at once so suddenly", Raizy Glauber's brother Joseph Silverstein said Monday.
"God created this world, this was his will, this was what he wanted, this is what he did and we accept his decree."
The Glaubers were married about a year ago and had begun a life together in Williamsburg, where Raizy Glauber grew up in a prominent Orthodox Jewish rabbinical family, Sara Glauber said.
Raised north of New York City in Monsey, N.Y., and part of a family that founded a line of clothing for Orthodox Jews, Nachman Glauber was studying at a rabbinical college nearby, said his cousin.
Jewish law calls for burial of the dead as soon as possible, and hours after their deaths, the Glaubers were mourned by at least 1,000 people at a funeral outside the Congregation Yetev Lev D'Satmar synagogue. Men in black hats gathered around the coffins in the middle of the street, while women in bright headscarves stood on the sidewalk, in accordance with the Orthodox Jewish tradition of separating the sexes at religious services.
The sound of wailing filled the air as two coffins covered in black velvet with a silver trim were carried from a vehicle. A succession of men and women delivered eulogies in Yiddish, sobbing as they spoke into a microphone about the young couple. "I will never forget you, my daughter!" said Yitzchok Silberstein, Raizy Glauber's father.
Afterward, the cars carrying the bodies left and headed to Monsey, where another service was planned in Nachman Glauber's hometown.
"You don't meet anyone better than him," said his cousin. "He was always doing favors for everyone."
She said Nachman's mother herself just delivered a baby two weeks ago.
"I've never seen a mother-son relationship like this," Sara Glauber said. "He called her every day to make sure everything was OK. He was the sweetest, most charming human being, always with a smile on his face."
She added that, of him and his bride, "If one had to go, the other had to go too because they really were one soul."
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