Woman, 75, fatally struck by dump truck and Jeep near Brooklyn home, both drivers leave scene

A 75-year-old woman was fatally struck by a dump truck and a Jeep just around the corner from her Brooklyn home — and both drivers left the scene, police said Sunday.

Yelena Gervolskaya was crossing the intersection at Shore Parkway and Shell Road in Gravesend at 10:25 a.m. Friday when the vehicles hit her, cops said.

The driver of a 2017 Mack dump truck making a left turn onto Shell Road hit Gervolskaya, followed by a 2021 Jeep Grand Cherokee driver making the same turn, cops said.

Gervolskaya, who suffered severe head trauma, died at the scene.

Friends and family described her as a doting matriarch of the family and a caring college professor.

“She raised me from an early age. She was a lovely person and a wonderful person,” her nephew, Alex Gervolskaya, said. “She taught ethics at the university in Tula, Russia.”

“She was an amazing person who gave all of what she had to her family,” he added.

Gervolskaya’s passion was literature, her nephew said.

“She was a poet.,” he said, her favorite authors were Proust and Balzac. “She was really all about books.”

Her best friend, Natalia Heiylina, who met Gervolskaya in Russia, when they were in their teens, described her as an “intellectual person.”

“She was wonderful. She was a very talented person,” Heiylina said. “She was a prolific poet. She wrote a lot of poetry. We would love to publish her work at some point.”

Her younger brother, Mikhail Gerlovskiy, 74, said that his sister was more of a mother to him.

“She was like the health of a family. You take it for granted when you have it but when you lose it you feel it very acutely,” he said.

Gervolskaya was a diminutive woman, standing 5′3,″ but her friends and family said that there was no way the drivers did not know that they struck her.

“It’s impossible. Even just a little bump you would feel something.,” Heiylina said. “It’s not logical.”

Police have identified the 38-year-old man driving the dump truck and the 40-year-old woman behind the wheel of the Jeep, a police spokeswoman said.

So far, neither has been charged criminally as police investigate whether they knew they struck the woman.

“Someone needs to answer,” Heiylina said.

Traffic fatalities are down by 13% citywide so far this year, with 131 deaths through July 30 compared to 150 in the same time frame last year.