A 28-year-old Roxbury man turned himself in to Boston police three days ago, more than a full day after his car allegedly struck a pedestrian and tore through a fence at 161 Bunker Hill Street in Charlestown, leaving the victim in critical condition. Police say Luis Serrano surrendered on a warrant charging him with assault to kill, and that the crash followed an argument between the driver and the pedestrian.
According to Boston Police Department records, officers responded to 161 Bunker Hill Street at 7:05 p.m. last Thursday after receiving a report of a pedestrian struck by a motor vehicle. The vehicle crashed through a fence and struck the person before the driver fled the scene, police say, and the victim was taken to a hospital in critical condition with serious injuries. Serrano surrendered to detectives at District A-1 in Downtown Boston at approximately 9:15 p.m. on Friday, roughly 26 hours after the collision, per the Boston Police Department.
Police say the warrant, issued out of Charlestown District Court, alleges assault to kill — a charge that, per Massachusetts General Laws Chapter 265, Section 29, carries a potential state prison sentence of up to 10 years or as much as two and a half years in a house of correction, according to the Law Office of Patrick J. Murphy. Prosecuting that charge requires proving specific intent to cause life-threatening harm, a notably higher bar than a standard traffic citation. As reported by Boston 25 News, Serrano was also cited for reckless operation of a motor vehicle and for leaving the scene of a crash resulting in personal injury.
An Argument Preceded the Crash, Police Say
Police told the station that the victim and Serrano had been involved in an argument before the crash — a detail that helps explain why investigators pursued the assault-to-kill warrant rather than treating the case solely as a traffic offense. The leaving-the-scene citation alone carries real consequences: under Massachusetts General Laws Chapter 90, Section 24, fleeing a personal-injury collision brings a mandatory minimum of six months up to two years in jail, plus a fine between $500 and $1,000 and license revocation, according to Aprodu Law. Serrano is expected to be arraigned Monday in Boston Municipal Court, though the victim's current medical status and the origin of the dispute remain unresolved questions heading into that hearing.
A Block With a Recent History of Police Response
The crash site sits within the Boston Housing Authority's Charlestown Housing Development, the city's largest public housing complex, per Massachusetts Landlords. The same block outside 161 Bunker Hill Street drew police attention this past February, when officers recovered ballistic evidence there following reports of gunfire, as Hoodline previously reported. Roughly a year and a half earlier, District A-15 officers had also responded to a pedestrian-struck call in a Charlestown parking lot that was later reclassified as a fatal shooting investigation, underscoring the range of severe incidents the precinct has handled.
Hit-and-Runs Remain a Persistent Statewide Problem
The Charlestown case fits into a broader pattern documented across Massachusetts. A June report from WalkMassachusetts found that 76 pedestrians were killed in traffic crashes statewide in 2025, accounting for more than 21 percent of the Commonwealth's 354 total traffic fatalities that year. The same analysis found that 17 percent of all fatal pedestrian collisions in Massachusetts in 2025 involved drivers who fled the scene, a statistic that echoes national data compiled by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety and cited by Scalli Murphy Law, which found fleeing drivers involved in roughly 20 percent of pedestrian fatalities nationwide.
Regional planners have taken notice of the toll. In March, the Boston Region Metropolitan Planning Organization endorsed an updated Vision Zero Action Plan aiming for zero traffic deaths by 2050, noting that nearly 1,000 people were killed or seriously injured in traffic crashes annually across the region between 2018 and 2022, according to the Boston Region MPO. For now, the immediate focus in Charlestown remains Monday's arraignment, where prosecutors are expected to lay out further details on the case against Serrano.
