A Central Park Runner Woke From Her Coma. Her Family Says Police Still Aren’t Investigating.

A 43-year-old runner struck from behind by an e-bike rider on Central Park’s West Drive on July 7 has begun to regain consciousness after roughly 11 days in a medically induced coma, her family said this week, an early milestone in what doctors expect to be a long recovery. Her family also says police have told them the collision is no longer being investigated.

In updates posted to a family fundraiser, the woman’s niece, Brandi Wiltse, wrote that her aunt is now awake, though “not yet verbal/communicating” and with the full extent of her comprehension still unclear. “She is awake and that is a huge milestone,” Wiltse wrote. Doctors extubated her on July 16, and she is breathing well while still being assisted with oxygen.

The woman, identified by her family only as Jean to protect her privacy, was hit near West 64th Street around 4:30 p.m. during an afternoon run, police told West Side Rag, which first reported the crash and, last week, her condition. She suffered a traumatic brain injury and has undergone emergency cranial surgery in which part of her skull was removed, surgery on a broken elbow, skin grafts for deep lacerations, and three blood transfusions, Wiltse told the outlet. The hospital admitted her as a Jane Doe because she could not give her name.

Jean grew up on Long Island and has lived in New York City for the past 10 years, with no immediate family nearby. Her sister flew in from Georgia the day after the collision and has stayed at her bedside, talking and reading to her. “The last thing we would want is for her to wake up by herself and have no idea what’s going on,” Wiltse told West Side Rag.

Accounts of the crash differ on a central point. Hoon Chan Sim, who witnessed it, told the New York Post that the rider was moving fast against traffic in the lane reserved for runners rather than in the bike lane. “He was going the wrong way on the running track,” Sim said. Wiltse, citing what police and eyewitnesses have told the family, described it differently to West Side Rag: the rider was in the bike lane but slid or swerved, hitting her aunt from behind.

The NYPD said the rider, a 26-year-old man, remained at the scene and provided his information. No arrest, summons, or charge has been reported. Police initially described Jean as “alert, conscious, and stable” when she was taken to the hospital, a characterization the family disputes, and the department would not tell the Post whether an investigation was open. Wiltse says officers told her there is none.

What rule the rider may have broken, if any, depends partly on which account is right, and the rules themselves have changed twice in nine months. E-bikes in New York City have been subject to a 15 mph speed limit since Oct. 24, 2025, with police instructed to warn first-time offenders rather than ticket them and to treat the limit as a secondary violation. And since March 27, under an order announced by Mayor Zohran Mamdani, police no longer issue criminal summonses to cyclists and e-bike riders for low-level traffic offenses, which now carry civil tickets, as they do for drivers. Riding the wrong way was a criminal offense for cyclists before that order, according to the Post. In June, City Councilman Frank Morano and eight residents sued in state court to overturn it, arguing that civil summonses do little to deter riders who are not registered, Bicycle Retailer and Industry News reported.

The park’s drives have a documented collision record. A 2024 study by Sam Schwartz Engineering for the Central Park Conservancy counted 522 collisions, 472 injuries, and one death on the drives from 2018 to 2022, amNewYork reported, in a park that draws 42 million visitors a year. In January, the commanding officer of the Central Park Precinct told a community board meeting that police had issued more than 100 summonses to e-bike riders in the previous quarter, while acknowledging that speed enforcement is hard because bicycles are too narrow for lidar speed guns to read. Citywide, there have been 514 e-bike collisions this year, nine of them fatal, up from 384 and six over the same period in 2025, according to public records cited by the Post.

The park’s managers have tightened rules on other users too: last September, the Parks Department warned that unsanctioned “Last 10” shakeout runs, held in the buildup to the New York City Marathon, violated park rules.

Wiltse has started a fundraiser to cover two months of rent on Jean’s apartment and her mother’s travel between Georgia and New York. Doctors have told the family that even in an optimistic scenario, Jean will remain hospitalized for six months. Her waking this week is the first sign that the longest phase of that recovery has begun.