Marion Van Reeth and Police Officer Max Solomon of the 1st Precinct leave together following a solemn gathering of remembrance by survivors and victims' families of the 2017 terror attack on the Hudson River bike path. Photo: Carl Glassman/Tribeca Trib
Seated among a small gathering of victims’ families and survivors of the 2017 terror attack on the Hudson River bikeway, Marion Van Reeth looked up from her wheelchair and smiled.
“The good thing about today is I find the hero!” said the 59-year-old Belgian whose legs were severed in the deadly terror assault by truck that killed eight people and wounded a dozen others that Halloween afternoon.
Beside her, on the plaza outside Stuyvesant High School, stood a beaming Max Solomon, the 1st Precinct police officer she credits with saving her life.
“He took care of me. He put me in the ambulance,” said Van Reeth, who had lain bleeding and unconscious on the bike path, the first, she believes, to be struck by the accused murder-crazed suspect, Sayfullo Saipov. Until that afternoon of Jan. 12, the two had not met.
“It’s amazing,” Solomon said of the reunion. The officer said he could not discuss the events because of the ongoing trial of the alleged terrorist. Solomon had been on the force just 20 months when he responded to the attack. Also at the gathering was Frank Ford, now the 1st Precinct’s community affairs officer, who was with Solomon that day and aided the survivors as well.
United by the tragedy and in New York for the trial, the group had come together to retrace the mile-long path of horror. Along the way, from Houston Street to the north end of Battery Park City, they stopped at memorial markers to remember and honor the victims.
“It’s tremendously emotional, but somewhere it’s part of the healing process,” said Aristide Melissas, Van Reeth’s husband, who underwent brain surgery for a fractured skull. The couple’s son Daryl also suffered a skull fracture. A nephew riding with them was unhurt. Melissas said that he, too, wants to meet the person who aided him, a man who he has seen in a video wearing a polo shirt with the number 3. “When I was lying on the ground he said, ‘Talk to me sir, talk to me, keep talking to me’ and he saved my life and I really want to thank him. This is an appeal to find him.”
The family, celebrating Melissas’s 47th birthday and the 16th birthdays of their son and his cousin, was riding Citi Bikes near Houston Street when the rented Home Depot pickup struck them. Among the eight people killed were six foreign tourists—five Argentinian friends celebrating the 30th anniversary of their high school graduation, and a Belgian mother of two young children. The attack also took the lives of two American men, Nicholas Cleves, 23, and Darren Drake, 32.
“It’s good to have done this,” Van Reeth said of the bike path gathering, reported here for the first time. “Because we all suffered.”
Saipov is accused of committing the slaughter with the aim of acceptance into the Islamic State. The pickup smashed into the side of a school bus on Chambers Street, injuring two people inside. In a video, Saipov is seen running onto Chambers flailing two seeming firearms—what turned out to be paintball and pellet guns—before he is shot by a police officer and arrested. He has since been held in solitary confinement in a federal prison. He has pleaded not guilty to 28 counts, including eight charges of murder. If the jury finds him guilty—his own lawyer does not deny he carried out the assault—they will then decide on a sentence of life in prison, or death.
“I hope justice is made because there are so many people who have been injured, people who have lost their dads or their husbands, their daughter or their sister,” Van Reeth said.
It was difficult, she recalled, to testify in front of Saipov, “who was thinking he was doing this for ISIS, and he had to kill the most people he could.”
“It’s unimaginable,” she added. “It’s just not human.”
