The victim’s husband said Dawood Faisal, who allegedly hit two cars while driving through red lights at a high speed, was ‘looking to do damage in a heavily Jewish area’
A Queens man who was indicted for manslaughter late last month after killing a woman in a three-car crash and then fleeing the scene was also charged with hate crimes yesterday for allegedly destroying property outside a kosher bagel shop just days before the crash.
Dawood Faisal, a resident of the Fresh Meadows neighborhood of Queens, allegedly drove more than 75 miles per hour in an area with a 35-mile-per-hour speed limit on the evening of May 25, speeding through two red lights and crashing into two cars. He hit the second car with such force that it careened into a crosswalk and struck two pedestrians, one of whom—71-year-old Cara Trager—suffered fatal injuries. According to Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz, Faisal attempted to flee the scene before bystanders chased him down. He faces more than 15 years in prison if convicted.
The incident came days after he allegedly vandalized a kosher bagel shop in Queens, Bagels & Co., on two separate occasions. On the evening of May 15, according to hate crimes charges brought against him on July 31, he knocked over nine metal plant stands outside the store—which displayed Israeli flags—and then allegedly threw dirt at the storefront. He returned in the middle of the night on May 23, allegedly pushing over 11 plant stands, dumping plants and dirt out onto the sidewalk, and ripping plants out of other pots. If convicted on the hate crime charges, he faces up to seven additional years in prison.
Trager, a longtime journalist, was known as an outspoken supporter of Israel and leader in the Queens Jewish community. Her husband, Michael—who was injured in the crash—told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency afterwards that he believed Faisal was “looking to do damage in a heavily Jewish area” like the neighborhood of Hollis Hills, a majority-Jewish section of Queens.
Faisal’s alleged crimes occurred amid a rise in antisemitic violence in New York City under Mayor Zohran Mamdani. That same month, according to NYPD data, antisemitic hate crimes jumped 46 percent compared to the three months that came before. New York City experienced 41 antisemitic hate crimes in May, averaging one every 18 hours, and hate crimes directed against Jews accounted for 60 percent of all hate crimes in the city.
The spike took place in the run-up to the June 23 New York primaries in which three anti-Israel candidates, all endorsed by Mamdani, won the Democratic nominations in their congressional districts. Claire Valdez, who defeated Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso in the 7th district, has falsely accused Israel of committing a “genocide” in Gaza and called for a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas “almost immediately” after the terror group’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack, according to progressive blog City and State. On the day of the attack, she liked an X post that described the massacres as “unthinkable bravery” and later sat for a friendly interview with a Twitch streamer who called Jews a “demonic ethnicity,” Jewish Insider reported.
Another Mamdani-backed candidate, Darializa Avila Chevalier, defeated incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D., N.Y.) in the 13th district’s primary election. Avila Chevalier attended a pro-Hamas rally in Times Square on Oct. 8, 2023 and helped organize the anti-Israel encampment on Columbia University’s campus alongside an organizer who said “Zionists don’t deserve to live” and who fantasized about “murdering Zionists.”
The third, Brad Lander, who defeated incumbent Dan Goldman in the state’s 10th district has accused Israel of committing a genocide and called to block U.S. aid to the Jewish state.
Mamdani has ratcheted up his anti-Israel rhetoric in the past several months. At a rally before the primaries, he described donors to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee as “monsters” and issued a lukewarm response after the owner of a Brooklyn coffee shop banned Goldman from the premises, citing his pro-Israel views. After spending months threatening to arrest Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu if Netanyahu came to New York, Mamdani released a video statement accusing the Israeli prime minister of being “the architect of a horrific genocide against the Palestinian people.” The next day, a man stabbed two people on the Upper West Side of Manhattan after yelling “allahu akbar,” with one of the stabbings occurring near a synagogue.
UJA-Federation of New York CEO Eric Goldstein said after Mamdani’s video that the mayor’s “political grandstanding” has “real-world consequences for the Jews of New York.”
“We want the mayor to stop demonizing the only Jewish state, using the most vilifying rhetoric, focused solely on the only Jewish state and the supporters of it,” he continued. “Using language like ‘monstrous,’ using the most horrible, difficult language that inflames, that terrorizes, that causes people to do terrible things.”
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