An unlicensed driver has been nabbed a year after cops say he abandoned his mangled Mercedes-Benz on a Queens expressway and fled a hit-and-run crash that killed an MTA supervisor who was on his way to work.
Members of the NYPD’s Collision Investigation Squad arrested James Vennitti, 63, on Tuesday for the Feb. 10 crash on the Whitestone Expressway that left 43-year-old David Berney dead.
“Happy beyond words — there are no words to describe,” Berney’s sister Monserrate Berney-Glover, 53, said Wednesday of the arrest after 12 excruciating months. “When this had initially happened we spoke about the unfortunate circumstance that a lot of these cases don’t get any resolution … We get to see who caused the pain for the family.”
Her brother was driving his silver Scion north on the expressway on his way to work as an MTA track supervisor when he got into a fender-bender with a 28-year-old man driving a Toyota RAV4, cops said.
The two men stopped their cars in the middle lane and were checking out the damage when Vennitti allegedly slammed his Mercedes into the rear of Berney’s car about 6:15 a.m.
A 44 year-old man was pronounced dead on scene after he was ejected onto the roadway on the Whitestone Expressway on Saturday. (Theodore Parisienne for New York Daily News)
Relatives said Berney had just returned to his vehicle and was thrown from the driver’s seat onto the pavement when he was rear-ended.
Berney died at the scene. The 28-year-old RAV4 driver was knocked to the ground in the crash and treated at a nearby hospital.
Vennitti drove off in his damaged Mercedes, which he ultimately abandoned further down the expressway before running off, according to cops. He lives in Bay Terrace, about three miles from where the crash occurred.
“You just can’t take a life and think you can live your life without any payback,” Berney-Glover told the Daily News a year ago after the crash. “Hopefully somebody somewhere sees it or knows what happened.”
“My brother is about 6-foot-1 [and] 220, 230 pounds so for you to be ejected from a car, how hard was your car hit?” she added. “He wasn’t a small man.”
David Berney. (Courtesy of Family)
A co-worker of Berney’s heading north on the Whitestone Expressway a short time later recognized the track worker’s car and alerted the MTA worker’s family, Berney-Glover recalled.
“Another supervisor eventually called [Berney’s sister] and said, ‘Hey, we think he had an accident on the highway,’” Berney-Glover recounted. “The supervisor said he hasn’t gotten here.”
A grand jury indicted Vennitti on charges of leaving the scene of an accident resulting in death and driving without a license after NYPD detectives determined he was the one driving the Mercedes at the time of the crash.
He was ordered released without bail following his arraignment in Queens Criminal Court Tuesday.
David Berney with his wife. (Courtesy of Family)
Berney was raised in Inwood, Manhattan, and later married and had a son, who is now middle school-aged. The family lived together in Jackson Heights
He worked for the MTA for about 15 years before his death and had recently begun talking about retirement, his sister said.
“He’s missed,” Berney-Glover said Wednesday. “I don’t think you can kind of quantify that.”