A late-night joyride through Bushwick has landed a 29-year-old driver in state prison. On May 11, 2026, Brooklyn resident Christopher Seabrook was sentenced to up to six years behind bars for a high-speed hit-and-run that killed 29-year-old Hayden Wallace and seriously injured three others at Irving Avenue and Stockholm Street.
Seabrook had pleaded guilty on April 16, 2026 to second-degree manslaughter, second-degree assault, and leaving the scene of an incident without reporting. Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice John Hecht handed down the sentence, closing a case that began just after midnight on January 8, 2024, when the quiet Bushwick intersection turned into a crash scene.
'Catastrophic' Overnight Crash
According to the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office, Seabrook was behind the wheel of a Kia Sportage, barreling through the neighborhood at a high rate of speed, when he slammed into a Toyota Yaris moving through the Stockholm Street intersection.
The impact was brutal. The force of the crash spun the smaller Toyota into several parked cars, turning the corner into a tangle of twisted metal. Prosecutors said the surviving passengers suffered injuries so severe they needed surgeries and long hospital stays.
“This defendant caused a catastrophic crash that killed a man and seriously injured three others,” District Attorney Eric Gonzalez said in a statement.
Victim Identified, Others Badly Hurt
Local reporting identified the man who did not make it out of the Toyota alive as 29-year-old Hayden Wallace, who had been riding in the right rear seat when the vehicles collided. The three other people in the car survived but paid a heavy price.
They were left with fractured ribs and clavicles, internal injuries, and organ damage, and they spent extended time in the hospital recovering and undergoing surgeries, according to Brooklyn Eagle. The violent crash also damaged multiple parked cars and jolted nearby residents out of their sleep.
Driver Runs, Investigators Close In
Prosecutors say Seabrook did not stick around to see the damage. After the collision, he climbed out of the Kia and ran off on foot, leaving the wrecked SUV behind in the street.
Surveillance cameras later captured him walking to a nearby smoke shop, footage that helped investigators track his movements. Authorities said the months-long investigation drew on work by the NYPD Collision Investigation Squad along with digital evidence analysts from the DA’s Office, who pieced together video and other clues to build the case.
Reporting by the New York Daily News noted that detectives tied the abandoned Kia to Seabrook using items left inside the vehicle and that he had prior run-ins with law enforcement. He was ultimately arrested in February 2025, more than a year after the crash.
Sentence Brings Case to a Close
With Justice Hecht’s sentence of up to six years in prison, the criminal chapter of the case formally closes, wrapping a timeline that stretched from the January 2024 wreck to Seabrook’s early 2025 arrest and his April 2026 guilty plea, as reported by Brooklyn Eagle.
Family members had previously described Wallace as a recent arrival to Brooklyn who was in the middle of building a new life in the city. Relatives attended court proceedings as the case moved through the system. In announcing the sentence, the DA’s Office publicly thanked the detectives and analysts who helped assemble the surveillance and digital evidence that led to Seabrook’s conviction.
