A young woman who valiantly beat cancer was mowed down and killed last night by a cowardly hit-run driver exiting the Staten Island Expressway.
Stephanie McDonald, 20, died of massive head trauma shortly after 9 p.m. at St. Vincent’s Hospital after she was hit on her way to a store with her boyfriend, relatives and police said.
“We think she had some papers, something in her hand she dropped, and the wind took it and she went to go retrieve them and the car hit her and didn’t stop,” said Stephanie’s mother, Pamela Rivera, 47.
The boyfriend, Michael Pinto, said he got a brief look at the vehicle, and thinks it may have been a Hyundai Santa Fe SUV.
Rivera, of Fahy Avenue in Graniteville – just down from the street from where her daughter was struck – said Stephanie had been diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma at 17, but had been in remission for two years.
“Two years cancer-free to get hit by a car – all that fighting, I really don’t know,” Rivera said, her voice choked with emotion.
The young woman, who hoped one day to become a chef, had four brothers.
Residents bitterly complain that cars regularly speed off the expressway into a neighborhood where houses nearly abutt the highway.
“The cars race up here,” Rivera said. “It’s a service road, and the cops are very good” about patrolling the area. “[But] they weren’t here tonight.”