The Tragic Death of Nadjari Reid
The pastor cousin of a Harlem dad who died Monday when a speeding Mercedes caused a chain-reaction car crash said she rushed to his side and told him she loved him as he lay dying.
“He was right on his back. I told him, ‘I love you, Cuz.’ He was just trying to catch his breath,” Pat Wilson, the 62-year-old relative of victim Nadjari Reid, told The Post.
Wilson said she’d run outside after her granddaughter came in yelling that there’d been a car crash out front, near the intersection of First Avenue and East 105th Street.
“I turned ’round, and it’s him,” Wilson said. “I said to my granddaughter, ‘Oh my God, that’s Cuz on the ground!’ I was just praying for him — ‘You gonna be all right, Cuz, you gonna be all right.’ I thought he was going to be all right.”
But she eventually realized her beloved 51-year-old cousin — who loved cooking, basketball, his friends and his community — wasn’t going to make it.
“It hurt me so bad — it’s really hurting,” she said, as tears streamed down her face. “We are going to miss him a lot.”
The wild, caught-on-camera accident that led to her cousin’s demise happened at about 3:40 p.m., when a white 2007 Mercedes driven by Angel Melendez, 51, careened down First Avenue at eye-popping speeds and slammed into a Chevy Tahoe — which then crushed Reid as tried to cross the street.
Melendez — who had a 14-year-old boy in the passenger seat — also nearly killed another woman crossing the street and clipped a parked, unoccupied Suzuki motorcycle during his startling joyride, according to cops and video of the accident.
Reid, who lived on East 105th Street, suffered severe leg trauma, cops said. Authorities rushed him to Weill Cornell Medical Center, but he didn’t make it.
On Tuesday, Melendez was arraigned on charges of second-degree manslaughter, criminally negligent homicide and endangering the welfare of a child, according to the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office.
A judge granted prosecutors’ request to hold him on a $500,000 cash bail or bond, the office added.
His next court date is Aug. 1.
He stayed at the scene and was brought to Metropolitan Hospital in stable condition. The teen riding with him was not hurt.
Wilson described her cousin — who lived with his sister and is the father of a teenage son — as a sweet man with many friends who loved him.
His father is a mess, she said. And his friends and neighbors are bereft at the loss.
“He was a great person. He was a caring person, a giving person,” said friend Damien Amaker, 43, before adding that his childhood pal loved chess and dominoes.
“Even as a child, when I come out here, he’d give me a dollar or coins to play video games,” he said, with tears in his eyes. “He looked out for everyone. If you needed something, you could always ask him.”
“He just had a brother who died two weeks ago, and he was still helping people,” Amaker continued.
“This was a very big loss for our neighborhood. People are going to be very devastated for a long time. Things are not going to be the same without him.”
A makeshift memorial — replete with a bottle of bourbon, empty bottles of champagne and 39 candles, one of which says “Cus, I love you” — has sprung up at a basketball court near his home.
“This block, it’s very hard,” Wilson said. “We are going through it around the block.”
Reid loved to cook, she said, and was the chef for every party.
“When I say ‘cook’ — he cooked everything,” she said. “Cooking was his thing. He was always going to the store and getting stuff to cook. He brought me some food.”
His specialties? Turkey wings, mac and cheese and macaroni salad.
“He made some mean macaroni salad that was out of this world,” Amaker added. “Anyone that has a gathering, a cookout, they asked him to make it. He called it ‘quick kitchen.’”
She’ll miss seeing his face when she walks out the door, she said. And their everyday back-and-forth that started with the words, “What’s up, Cuz?”
Wilson added that she’s paranoid to cross the street now, especially with her young granddaughter in tow.
“[What if there] was a baby on that corner?” she asked. “I can’t imagine what that could’ve been.”
Now she’s left praying for her dear cousin.
“We all have to go,” she said. “That’s why I tell everybody to love one another, because you might be here today and gone tomorrow, like my cousin.”
“I would never have thought he would have left that day. But he can’t come back,” she continued. “We all have that time to go … but we can’t bring him back.”
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