A 50-year-old Selden man died Wednesday morning after the car he was repairing in his own driveway became dislodged from its jack, rolled backward down the sloped surface, and trapped him beneath it. Nadeem Ahmad was working on a 2002 Toyota Camry at his Tuscala Street home when the accident occurred shortly after 8 a.m.
Ahmad was taken to Stony Brook University Hospital, where he was pronounced dead, according to Newsday. The Suffolk County Police Department said Ahmad was killed after the car he was repairing fell on top of him, and that the vehicle had become dislodged from the jack supporting it before rolling down the driveway. Stony Brook University Hospital is Suffolk County's only Level 1 Trauma Center for both adult and pediatric care, serving as the primary regional emergency facility for Long Island's roughly 1.5 million residents, per Stony Brook Medicine.
Homicide Squad detectives are investigating Ahmad's death, though police have characterized it as not suspicious. That assignment reflects standard protocol rather than any indication of criminality: Suffolk County Police Department homicide detectives routinely investigate non-criminal fatal home and workplace accidents to rule out foul play and confirm the mechanical cause of death, as Newsday reported. Police could not immediately say how they were notified of the accident.
A Sloped Driveway and a Widespread Hazard
The precise physical dynamics described in the case echo a well-documented national safety problem. Per Daily Voice, the Camry rolled backward down the sloped driveway after slipping off its jack, trapping Ahmad beneath it. The New York Fatality Assessment and Control Evaluation program, run by the New York State Department of Health, explicitly warns home mechanics against jacking vehicles on inclined or sloped surfaces, noting that driveway slopes drastically reduce jack stability and create severe vehicle rolling hazards.
Federal data underscores how common these incidents are. A National Highway Traffic Safety Administration study estimated that roughly 4,822 people nationwide are treated in emergency departments each year for injuries tied to vehicle jack failures or collapses, and the agency's safety data shows that about 74 percent of jack-related injuries happen when the jack or the vehicle slips, shifts, or drops while someone is working nearby or underneath. NHTSA's non-crash injury surveillance also found that 57 percent of all non-traffic vehicle injuries occur at residential homes, with emergency room cases overwhelmingly involving male do-it-yourself mechanics.
Federal Guidance on Jack Stands and Chocks
Safety standards from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health state that hydraulic or scissor jacks should never serve as primary support, mandating that a vehicle's full weight be transferred onto certified heavy-duty jack stands before anyone crawls underneath. Those same guidelines, paired with the state health department's warning about sloped surfaces, point to the two conditions investigators say were present in Selden: an incline and a vehicle resting on a jack alone.
Driveway crush accidents like the one that killed Ahmad have surfaced elsewhere in recent months. Hoodline reported on a similar fatal driveway crash in Riviera Beach, Florida, where a 27-year-old man was crushed and killed after a 2015 Kia Optima slipped off a jack while elevated on a sloped driveway.
A Hamlet at the Center of Long Island
Selden is an unincorporated hamlet with a population of 21,262, located in the geographic center of Long Island within the Town of Brookhaven, Suffolk County's most populous township, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Ahmad's death adds a local face to a hazard that federal and state safety researchers have tracked for years among home mechanics working on residential driveways.
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