A month after being knocked unconcious to the pavement by a bicyclist on a Manhattan street, 67-year-old Mary Grace Belfi is still taking headache and seizure medication and has difficulty with her speech.
Belfi had just parked her car on First Avenue and 86th Street on June 9, and was crossing a bike lane on First Avenue to bring a muni-meter ticket back to the car when she was hit, said her daughter, who was with Belfi for a lunch outing.
"I was in the passenger seat and I saw him whizzing by out of the periphery of my eye, and I saw her just drop," said daughter Lilly Belfi.
"She was on the ground unconscious, seizing, bleeding everywhere. Blood was coming out of her nose and mouth," she said.
The Queens grandmother woke up in the ICU with a traumatic head injury three days later. She had extensive bleeding on the brain, a broken nose and a broken collarbone, according to Lilly Belfi.
Mary Grace Belfi said she never saw the bike coming. Still in a hospital bed on the first floor of her Douglaston home one month later, she needs help going up and down the stairs.
"I get very, very dizzy. I still don't do the steps on my own for fear I might fall," she said. "Sometimes when I'm talking I'll lose the sentence, I have difficulty finding words I want to use."
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Police are still looking for the bicyclist, captured on dash cam pedaling away just after the hit. The bike was red with white front shocks, and the man wore denim shorts, knee braces and a blue-and-white helmet.
"I'd say he should be more responsible, these are people's lives you are playing with," said Belfi. "These are people's lives you are playing with, you don't leave someone bleeding on the ground. Who does that? I would really push for this man to somehow pay the consequences."
Belfi said she's grateful her daughter Lilly was with her and that she wasn't the one who was hit. Lilly was pregnant at the time with Belfi's fifth grandson.
"Little Clayton was born and he is beautiful," said Belfi.
