An 87-year-old woman who died in her Brooklyn driveway when her car rolled backward and ran her over was remembered this week as a loving grandmother to 10.
Joan Behan was returning home from a workout class around 3 p.m. Wednesday when she parked her car in her driveway on W. 10th St. near Lake Place in her native Gravesend shortly before 3 p.m. Wednesday, police and her daughter said.
“[The detective] said that she, like, slumped over in her own lap,” said her daughter, Jennifer DiGrazia. “I said, ‘Maybe she was going to pick something up?’ and he goes, ‘That’s what I thought, but we never saw her lift up.’”
Detectives believe Behan suffered a medical episode and wasn’t able to put her car in park in the sloped driveway.
“My mother was a very good driver, and she was very conscientious,” DiGrazia, 58, told the Daily News. “There’d be no way that she would just step out of a car that she didn’t put in park while it’s still moving. So something else was happening.”
Behan’s car rolled backward and she fell out of the vehicle and onto the pavement, her daughter said.
The car rolled over Behan. She was rushed to NYU Langone Hospital-Brooklyn with severe head and body trauma, but she could not be saved.
DiGrazia raced to the hospital when neighbors called and told her what happened.
“I knew [she died], I felt it,” she said. “Everyone said, don’t jump to conclusions. I just felt if my mother got dragged under her own car, and she’s 87 — you know. I lost it.”
Medical staff at the hospital brought DiGrazia and her family into a room and told them Behan had died.
“I hope that she was unconscious before she even hit the floor,” she said. “She was an angel, and it shouldn’t have ended that way. Angels shouldn’t die that way.”
Behan was born and raised in Gravesend. She had two sons, a daughter and 10 grandchildren.
“She was always there for her children, even as an adult,” DiGrazia recalled. “You just always knew that life was going to be OK because, no matter what, you had her. She had your back.”
Behan had plans to move with her daughter to Florida in the fall, where DiGrazia and her brother recently bought houses across the street from one another.
“It was the dream, and it was my mother’s dream,” DiGrazia said of the move. “She wanted to live with me and my daughter because she knew she was getting older and her mobility was going.
“She was [going to] be taken care of by her children and her granddaughter,” she added. “She couldn’t wait.”
