Mayor Eric Adams is putting up $1,000 of his own money to help catch the wrong-way driver who killed a groom-to-be just one day before his wedding last weekend.
Adams announced the reward Tuesday for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the hit-and-run motorist who rammed his pick-up truck into a Dodge Challenger carrying Kirk Walker, a 38-year-old father of three who was set to be wed on Sunday.
“Any accident is a terrible accident but some of them turn into Shakespearean tragedies,” Adams told reporters during his weekly press briefing at City Hall.
The mayor said he was confident New Yorkers will find the reckless motorist, who booked it on foot after the crash, and urged the public to submit tips if they have them.
Walker and his cousin, Robert McLaurin, 40, were out for the bachelor party when their car was hit by the Chevy Silverado driver barreling the wrong way down the Henry Hudson Parkway at around 2:20 a.m. Saturday, killing them both, cops said.
“I’m supposed to be in my wedding dress right now — not in mourning,” Walker’s devastated fiancée, Shauntea Weaver, 40, told The Post on the day the couple were to tie the knot in a huge ceremony at the Royal Manor wedding venue in Garfield, New Jersey.
“I feel like this is a TV show and I’m going to wake up any minute and go back to my real life,” Weaver said. “Every hour since it happened, I’m having a different emotion take me over.”
The couple had started a successful car rental business that had prospered thanks to Walker’s incredibly hard work, she added.
Weaver called the crash “devastating, and not just for me.”
“He has three children that loved him immeasurably. They are heartbroken that their father’s been taken.”
Walker’s mother was also left shattered, according to Adams, who said he’d spoken to her Tuesday morning.
“Just a horrific, horrific incident, crash and the family is devastated,” the mayor said. “The mom wasn’t able to hold it together. I spoke to the sister as well.”
The family is looking to hold a memorial ceremony at the site of the crash – “and we’re going to do everything we can to coordinate,” Adams said.
“Number one, I want to bring closure, to apprehend the [driver],” he said. “And number two, to allow them to have some sort of closure at the site.”
The still-at-large driver and a passenger in his Chevy jumped out just before their truck went up in flames, according to police.
Cops caught up with the passenger, a 21-year-old man, about 30 feet from the crash and brought him to the hospital. He has not been charged with a crime.
The driver also slammed into a 2018 Audi S3 as it whizzed along the parkway – sending the two men inside to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries, cops said.
CREDIT: NY Post Haley Brown and Amanda Woods
