Queens tragedy

By Patrick Markey

In the second car tragedy to strike New York’s Irish community in the last month, an Irish man believed to be from Cavan was killed in an early morning road accident in Queens just six months after he married his wife, who is pregnant with the couple’s child, police and family associates said.

Jason Doyle and his older brother Mark were critically injured when their car collided with a van in the early hours of Sunday morning in the Long Island City section of Queens, according to police and family associates. Jason was pronounced dead at Western Queens Hospital an hour after the accident, a hospital spokeswoman said.

Although police had no record of his involvement in the accident, Mark Doyle was taken to Elmhurst hospital, according to Msgr. Charles Boccio, a priest at the church where funeral services were to take place, and a spokeswoman for the funeral home.

On Tuesday, a spokeswoman for Elmhurst Hospital confirmed Mark Doyle was in fair condition in the hospital’s surgical intensive care unit.

A member of the Doyle family reached by telephone said the family would prefer not to talk because previous stories on the accident had mistakenly identified the victims. But Msgr. Boccio said Jason had married his wife, Jennifer, six months ago at Astoria’s Immaculate Conception, where she had also gone to school.

Two other people were injured in the accident and were taken to Elmhurst Hospital with injuries, one of them critical, a Fire Department spokesman said.

Police said Jason Doyle was traveling in a 1990 Saab car on Northern Boulevard just after 4 a.m. on Sunday. The driver made a turn onto Steinway Street, but collided with the Ford van as it entered the intersection, a police department spokesman said. Investigators have determined the incident was an accident and no arrests have been made.

A daily newspaper photograph illustrating the crash showed the Saab car with the roof almost completely sheared off. On the other side of a lamp-post the van faced in the opposite direction, its front end dented.

On April 11, another Irish family was struggling to overcome the loss of their son who was killed in an accident near a Bronx bar just a fortnight before he was due to be married.

Brendan Ryan, a well-liked member of the Irish American community, was hit by a speeding car in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. He had been celebrating his bachelor party with friends at a function just before he was killed.