Actor Carrie Bernans was among those hurt on New Year’s Day when a driver fleeing police plowed into an outdoor dining area at a New York City restaurant, injuring several people.
Bernans, 29, an actor and stuntperson in “Black Panther,” “The Color Purple” and “Luke Cage,” was knocked unconscious and penned under a bus in the hit-and-run, her mother said on social media and a GoFundMe campaign.
Bernans sustained broken bones, fractures and chipped teeth and required emergency surgery, according to the information posted Tuesday on her Instagram account.
Bernans, the mother to an 8-month-old, is unable to breastfeed her son “due to the medications she is currently taking to subdue the pain between her surgeries,” wrote her mother, Patricia Lee.
Despite her injuries, Bernans said on GoFundMe that she is “filled with hope and faith in the unfolding of a beautiful new chapter.”
“Amidst the chaos of the New Year’s incident, I’m holding on to an immense sense of gratitude for life itself,” Bernans wrote on GoFundMe.
New York police said that before the crash, officers were responding to a report of physical assault by a 44-year-old male driver against his 34-year-old female passenger.
Officers tried to get the driver to park, but he fled and ended up driving on the sidewalk, where he “struck a food cart and two 39-year-old female pedestrians, a 31-year-old female pedestrian, and a 29-year-old female pedestrian,” police said in a statement.
The driver also struck two parked cars and a vehicle in the road. Two officers and the passenger were also injured, police said.
Their conditions and identities were not provided.
The driver was then taken into custody.