Driver who hit and run in hit-and-run crash that killed 72-year-old Queens woman arrested: police

The hit-and-run driver who killed a 72-year-old Queens woman on her way home from work almost five years ago is finally behind bars, police said Friday.

Naquan Young, 46, was arrested in connection with a fatal crash that occurred on September 10, 2019, in South Richmond Hill on Thursday afternoon and has been charged with involuntary manslaughter, criminally negligent homicide, assault and leaving the scene of a collision.

According to police, after the tragic accident in which his Lexus and the Honda SUV belonging to his victim, Gilda Lascano, were destroyed, Young fled the scene on foot and disappeared.

Lascano, a cleaner at Estee Lauder in Manhattan, was sitting in the backseat of an SUV as it pulled off 126th St. around 1:30 a.m. when Young ran a red light at 111th Ave. and hit her vehicle.

She died at the scene – just one block from her home, police said.

“The car they were in had the rear completely destroyed. You could just see the frame,” neighbor Joel Rios said of Lascano’s vehicle at the time. “A silver Lexus, you could see he hit it, and he hit it hard… The whole front end was damaged.”

The 56-year-old woman driving the Honda was taken to Jamaica Hospital with serious injuries but survived.

“Some people said the woman under the truck was still alive, so I wanted to check if she was breathing,” Rios said of Lascano. “I called her, but she didn’t answer. There was no movement in her chest… Our neighbors told us it was their mother and her friend was driving her home from work.”

Lascano, originally from Ecuador, had lived in the U.S. for 38 years, said distraught relatives who were shocked that Young fled the scene on foot.

“Who runs away from an accident when they see someone dying?” Antonio Vargas, Lascano’s 47-year-old son-in-law, said after the tragic accident. “She was a hard-working woman. She was going to retire in a few months.

“She was a loving person and that’s how she died,” he added. “She was like a mother to me for 30 years. She always defended me, always stood by me. She loved me. I’m just in shock.”

Young lives in South Ozone Park, about a mile from the crash. During the investigation, detectives with the New York Police Department’s collision investigation unit had long believed Young was driving, but he was not considered an official suspect until he was linked to DNA recovered from a Lexus airbag, said a police source with knowledge of the case.

By then he had already been arrested in Pennsylvania on unrelated charges of drunken driving and drug possession, the source said.

The alleged hit-and-run driver has six arrests on his record, mostly for drug possession and theft, police said. He has never been to prison. After fleeing the scene, Young was arrested for theft in 2020, according to authorities. It was his last arrest until Thursday.

The Queens District Attorney’s Office charged Young with murder and manslaughter. Members of the NYPD’s Regional Fugitive Task Force arrested him after his criminal case in Pennsylvania was resolved.

On Thursday afternoon, after a brief court hearing, a warrant was issued for his arrest without bail.